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Our Lady of the Pillar (officially in Spanish, Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Zaragoza) is recognized as the first Marian apparition in the history of Christianity and is the only one that happened while the Virgin Mary was still alive. Although it was technically a bilocation of Our Lady, because she was living with John the Apostle in Jerusalem, it is still regarded as an apparition by the tradition of the Church.
According to tradition, James the Greater, brother of Saint John the Evangelist, traveled with great effort to Roman Hispania (modern-day Spain) to evangelize the local tribes. He not only confronted great difficulties but he also saw very little apostolic fruits of conversion. Tradition says that when he was at his lowest point of discouragement, in A.D. 40, while he was sitting by the banks of the Ebro river in Zaragoza (back then known as Caesaraugusta) Mary appeared to him accompanied by thousands of angels, to console and encourage him.
The Virgin Mary, with the Child Jesus in her arms and standing on a pillar, asked Saint James and his eight disciples to build a church on the site, promising that “it will stand from that moment until the end of time in order that God may work miracles and wonders through my intercession for all those who place themselves under my patronage.”
Our Lady is also said to have given the small wooden statue of the apparition to Saint James, which now stands on the pillar she stood on.
[...] In 1637, a youngster employed on a farm, Juan Miguel Pellicer, born in Calanda, Spain in a family of seven children, fell from a cart. A wheel broke his right leg, crushing the tibia right down the middle. He was admitted to a hospital in Valencia on August 3, 1637, and then transferred to the royal hospital in Zaragoza in early October.
Reduced to begging, he tried different remedies in vain. At the end of October, his leg was amputated four fingers above the knee. He left the hospital in the spring of 1638 and returned to live in Calanda, among his own. The night of March 29, 1640, he slept in a room with his parents. Juan Miguel prayed to Our Lady of the Pilar before going to bed and then he had a dream in which he saw the Blessed Virgin rubbing his sore stump with oil from the lamps in the chapel of Saragossa.
In the morning, his father discovered two feet under the covers: the amputated leg had returned. A canonical trial began on June 5, 1640. On April 22, 1641, the municipality of Calanda chose Our Lady of the Pilar as its patron saint. On April 27, Bishop Apaolaza, Archbishop of Zaragoza, declared: "We say, vote and declare that Juan Miguel Pellicer (...) has miraculously recovered his right leg which previously had been amputated. This restitution is not the work of nature, but was carried out in a miraculous and admirable way and should be recognized as a miracle."
A medal to commemorate the miracle was struck in 1671.