Altar de la Santa Muerte

The first public shrine

On 31 October 2001, Enriqueta Romero Romero moved a figure of Santa Muerte out of her house and into a glass case on the pavement outside Alfarería 12. The address is in Colonia Morelos, in the Tepito barrio of Mexico City. The figure stands over a metre and a half tall and wears a long gown, a cape and a hat. Romero had kept it indoors for years. By one account it came to her from an aunt who was devoted before her.

Santa Muerte had been venerated privately in Mexico for generations, in bedrooms and closed rooms, by people who did not discuss it outside the family. Romero's glass case is usually treated as the moment the devotion became public. The shrine has stood on that spot ever since.

How many devotees there are

R. Andrew Chesnut is a professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. His book Devoted to Death, published by Oxford University Press in 2012 and updated in 2017 and 2025, was the first academic study of Santa Muerte in English. He estimates there are 10 to 12 million devotees, with about 70 percent in Mexico, 15 percent in the United States and 10 percent in Central America.

No survey backs those numbers up. Chesnut says plainly that no census of devotees exists and that his estimate comes from about ten years of fieldwork. Most reporting on Santa Muerte repeats his figure, including the reporting that describes it as the fastest growing religious movement in the Americas.

The Church and the state

In April 2005 the Mexican Interior Ministry cancelled the religious association registration of the Iglesia Católica Tradicional Mex-USA, a church led by David Romo Guillén. The stated reason was that promoting Santa Muerte veneration departed from the purposes set out in the church's own bylaws. It lost the right to hold property, to bring in foreign ministers and to broadcast services. In March 2009 the army bulldozed more than 40 roadside Santa Muerte shrines in Nuevo Laredo and Tijuana. More were demolished in Coahuila afterwards.

The Catholic Church has been equally direct. Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said during a 2013 visit to Mexico that it is not religion just because it is dressed up like religion, and that it is a blasphemy against religion. Pope Francis criticised macabre symbols when he visited Ecatepec in 2016.

None of this reached Alfarería 12. The shrine was never demolished.

What ended in 2016

For fifteen years the shrine held a rosary on the 1st of every month, and a midnight service on 1 November drew the largest crowds of the year. The last of those rosaries was held on 1 June 2016.

Six days later, at around 7am on 7 June, two men on a motorcycle fired on the shrine. Raymundo Romero, known as Rey, who was 70 and ran the Santa Muerte shop next door, was killed. Rafael Romero, 65, Enriqueta's younger brother, was wounded and survived. Reporting at the time treated it as a targeted killing rather than a robbery, on the grounds that street robberies in Tepito do not happen at that hour or single out men in their sixties and seventies. No motive was made public.

From July 2016 the family cancelled the rosaries and did not resume them. Romero's stated reason was that she did not want anything to happen to the people who came. Devotees kept arriving anyway, individually and in large numbers on the 1st of each month, leaving sweets, flowers, candles, cigarettes and rosaries at the case. Most travel writing about the shrine still describes the monthly rosary as though it were running.

Two women named Enriqueta

Searching for whether Enriqueta Romero is still alive returns an obituary for a different person. Enriqueta Vargas Ortiz ran the Templo Santa Muerte Internacional in Tultitlán, a separate and much larger operation that briefly held legal registration before the Interior Ministry revoked it. Vargas died of cancer on 18 December 2018. Her son Jonathan Legaria had been assassinated in 2008. The two women are routinely confused in coverage.

What can be confirmed about the woman at Alfarería 12 is that reporting through 2024 still described her as the shrine's guardian, and that her age is given as 65, 76 and 78 in three different articles. The shrine's 25th anniversary falls on 31 October 2026.

The shrine is on the pavement outside Alfarería 12 and can be seen at any hour. There is no gate, ticket or opening time. Metro Line B to Tepito leaves you about two blocks away.

It's best to visit in the morning. The 1st of the month is when most devotees come and the street is at its fullest, with families and regulars there through the day. The organised monthly rosary that ran until 2016 has not resumed, so what you will see is people arriving to leave offerings rather than a scheduled service. Local guides run walking tours of the barrio for around $40 that last 2 to 3 hours, and going with someone the neighbourhood knows is the usual advice for a first visit.

It is worth remembering that this is a working devotional site outside somebody's home rather than a visitor attraction. It's best practice to ask before taking photos, or to frame your shots so that the public isn't included, since no could very much be the answer. People are often seen bringing a range of offerings, from flowers and chocolates through to tequila and cigarettes, and picking something up from the stalls on the street is a normal way to arrive. As with anywhere unfamiliar it's worth staying alert, and it's best to start heading home before dark.