The day starts very early as there are many daylight hours at the start of summer. The early June mornings radiate enchantment. The climate is caressing, the air pure, with light softly shining through the clouds, awakening the birds, brightly outlining things with an array of colors.

    Dawn is known only too well by the inhabitants of Garabandal due to the demands of their work as cattle raisers and fanners; so they do not get up early to enjoy the Sunday mornings. Most of them arise later than usual, since the Lord's Day was made for rest.

    The men wash and shave, something they do not do everyday. The women bustle around, busier than on other mornings, arranging their family's clothes, since no one is going to go to Sunday Mass without their dress being clean or their suit pressed.

    When the bells peal out from the massive church tower to awaken the village, the sounds of a festival day fill the air. The harsh music from the bells bounces off the tile roofs, reverberating through the narrow streets to be lost far away in the fields and prairies, in the streams and river beds, finally absorbed in the trees and shrubs dotting the hills surrounding the village.

    The bells ring out first for the Mass, later for the rosary. Without a Mass or a rosary crowded with participants, how could one picture a feast day in Garabandal? Father Valentin Marichalar, the pastor from Cossio, who is also in charge of the parish of San Sebastian, arrives for Mass after traveling up six kilometers of bad road. The rosary is led by any one of the faithful, who can say it without making mistakes in the mysteries or the litany that follows.

    The Mass can take place at any time according to the disposition of the pastor. But the rosary is said a little after dinner, since everyone is free at that hour, and there will be time left over for the people to relax and amuse themselves.

    On this evening the young people are organizing a little dance on Caballera Street, although some of them are talking about going down to Cossio or Puentenansa. (There was no movie theater, television set, or town hall in Garabandal.) Some of the men cluster together to talk; others dispute loudly in the tavern. Some women, many of whom wear the black widow's dress, remain in the church. Others wander down the paths to their homes chatting with one another, or sit down with their neighbors to pass the time on the stone seats next to the house doorways.

    The children, as usual, play ... where they can and how they can. To get away from the calm silence and solitude, most of the boys and girls walk to the square. In this group the games and amusements must not have been very entertaining, since one of them -- a personable young brunette with braids -- to escape the boredom ending the evening of that Sunday like any other, suddenly got an idea which she swiftly whispered in the ear of the girl next to her. She herself would confess it months later. [Conchita Gonzalez was her name. She was the last child, the only girl among the offspring of Aniceta Gonzalez, a woman from the village who had lost her husband prematurely. At the beginning of our story Conchita was twelve years old; she was a gracious girl, very observant, with a quick mind. However in education she was backward like all the young girls in Garabandal. Her culture could not advance much beyond what she learned at the school in her secluded little village.

   Surely on someone's recommendation, Conchita started writing her diary in 1962. In it, in the language of a child, short and to the point, she would tell things that she could not blot out from her memory. I have in my hands photocopies of the original. The pages are large, on a school notebook, written down in wobbly penmanship, with many faults in spelling: but truly charming in what they say.

    Her diary begins like this:
    I am going to tell in this book about my apparitions and my daily life.
    The most important happening in my life occurred on June 18, 1961, in San Sebastian ...
    It happened in the following way ...