Every year, a day honoring the spiritual protector of the Dominican people, Our Lady of Altagracia, is celebrated on 21 January, a national holiday. On the previous Wednesday, 17 January, the commemorative National Symphony Concert will take place at the Basilica Nuestra Senora de la Altagracia in Higuey, the largest in the Caribbean. During his second trip to the country on 12 October 1992, Pope John Paul II himself crowned the Virgin with a golden-plated silver crown, blessed the church and the people of the Dominican Republic and said mass there. The Basilica was inaugurated by President Joaquin Balaguer on 21 January 1971, at the start of his second term in government. Off the altar of the church is an early 16th century jewel-encrusted portrait of the Virgin Mary. Dominican soldiers appealed to the Virgin to help them win a strategic victory over the French in a 1691 battle in La Limonade, near Cap-Haitien in northern Haiti.