Blessed Salvador Valera Parra

Who was Blessed Salvador Valera Parra?

Blessed Salvador Valera Parra was a diocesan priest who spent nearly his whole life in the town where he was born, Huércal-Overa, in the dry hills of Almería in southern Spain. People there still call him simply el Cura Valera, "Father Valera." He cared for the sick through epidemics of cholera, refused to leave his people when earthquakes threatened, and lived so poorly that he had almost nothing to give away by the end. He was beatified on February 7, 2026, and we keep his memorial on February 27, his birthday.

Spaniards have long called him the Spanish Curé of Ars. It is a fair comparison. He never founded an order or wrote a book. He was a parish priest, and that was enough.

A farmworker's son becomes a priest

Salvador was born on February 27, 1816, to a family of modest farmworkers. The house where he was born still stands on the street that now bears his name. Spain in his childhood knew epidemics, famine and anticlerical persecution. At fourteen he went to Murcia to study for the priesthood at the seminary of San Fulgencio, helped by an aunt who was abbess of a convent of Capuchin Poor Clares. He was ordained in 1840, according to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints (some accounts give 1838), and returned home as a chaplain.

Alhama, Huércal-Overa and Cartagena

From 1849 he served the parish of San Lázaro in Alhama de Murcia. When he was due to go home in 1851, the people of Alhama asked him to stay. He went anyway: that year he became parish priest of Huércal-Overa, and in 1853 its archpriest.

In 1864 his bishop sent him to Cartagena, the busy naval city on the coast and the largest parish in the diocese. The next year cholera struck. He went from house to house among the sick and their families, and the city council recorded its thanks and gave him a chalice, which is still kept in Huércal-Overa. He also helped calm uprisings in the city's prison.

In September 1868, after the revolution that brought General Juan Prim to power, honors were offered to him. He turned them down and asked only to go home. At the end of 1868 he returned to Huércal-Overa with his elderly mother and stayed there for the rest of his life.

The Cura Valera of Huércal-Overa

For the next twenty years he was the town's father. He gave away food and clothing, sat up through the night with the dying, and raised money for the poor. During the earthquakes of 1863 and later alarms he refused to leave the town unless the prisoners he cared for were taken to safety too. In 1885 a great cholera epidemic swept Spain, and he nursed its victims again. That same year he founded a home for the elderly poor together with St. Teresa of Jesus Jornet, foundress of the Little Sisters of the Abandoned Elderly.

His devotion was simple and strong: the Eucharist, and Our Lady, whom Huércal-Overa honors as the Virgen del Río. According to the Diocese of Almería, an archbishop of Valencia who met him said: "No estoy hablando de un hombre ni de un sacerdote, hablo de un ángel." ("I am not speaking of a man or a priest; I am speaking of an angel.")

He died in Huércal-Overa on March 15, 1889, at seventy-three, with a reputation for holiness. He was buried beneath the presbytery of his parish church.

The miracles of Blessed Salvador Valera Parra

• Wonders in his lifetime: reported. Vatican News notes that people attributed miracles to him even during his lifetime. These were never investigated by the Church.

• The baby in Rhode Island: approved. On January 14, 2007, a baby boy, Tyquan Hall, was born at a hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, pale, cyanotic and with a dangerously low heart rate. The attending physician, Dr. Juan Sánchez-Esteban, was himself from Huércal-Overa. When every effort had failed, he prayed: "Father Valera, I have done everything possible; now it's your turn." As he went to tell the parents that their son had died, a nurse told him the baby was recovering. Doctors expected brain damage. There was none. Pope Leo XIV approved the healing as a miracle on June 20, 2025.

His cause and beatification

The first steps toward his cause were taken in the Diocese of Cartagena in the 1950s, and the Diocese of Almería, to which Huércal-Overa now belongs, later carried it forward. Pope Francis declared him Venerable in March 2021. Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, beatified him in Huércal-Overa on February 7, 2026. In his homily the cardinal said that in Valera "the title of 'cura' found its most authentic meaning." The next day Pope Leo XIV mentioned the beatification at the Sunday Angelus.

Symbols of Blessed Salvador Valera Parra in art

Because he lived in the age of photography, his image is fixed by the old photograph shown at the top of this page: an elderly, thin-faced priest in a black cassock, skullcap and long cape, with a cross-shaped decoration on his chest; holy pictures of him are based on it. A rosary recalls his love for Our Lady, and bread or a basket of food stands for his charity to the poor. Look for him in Huércal-Overa, where a monument stands in his honor and the square in front of his church bears his name.

Prayer to Blessed Salvador Valera Parra

The association that promoted his cause publishes an official prayer for his intercession on its website. Let us pray in our own words, too: Blessed Salvador, faithful parish priest, you stayed with your people in sickness, earthquake and need. Pray for our priests, for the sick and for the poor, and for every parish that needs a shepherd like you.