The Miracle of Calanda: The Man Whose Amputated Leg Came Back — Aragon, Spain, 1640

About this episode

In 1637, a wagon wheel crushed the leg of a young farmer named Miguel Juan Pellicer so badly that surgeons amputated it below the knee to save his life. The severed limb was buried in a hospital cemetery. For two and a half years, Pellicer begged for alms outside a basilica in Zaragoza on a wooden leg, a familiar and pitied figure to the people of the city. On the night of March 29th, 1640, his mother walked into the room where he was sleeping and saw two feet sticking out from under the blanket. This is not a story about a misdiagnosis or an amputation that never happened. Multiple surgeons who performed and witnessed the original operation testified under oath, before an ecclesiastical court, that they had removed Pellicer's leg years earlier. When investigators exhumed the burial site afterward, they found it empty. The Archbishop of Zaragoza opened a formal canonical investigation. Over one hundred witnesses testified across more than a year of hearings — doctors, surgeons, priests, neighbors, and Pellicer's own family. In 1641, the archbishop formally declared the restoration of his leg a miracle. The Catholic Church holds that position to this day. Host Shawn Spainhour tak