For today's Geo Quiz we were looking for Guatemala's second city.

It's named after the country's national bird....the Quetzal.

And the city is Quetzaltanango. Locals call it Xela.

It's home to Mayan culture, volcanoes and a woman who, legend has it, can mend a broken heart.

Listen as producer Chana Joffe Walt tells her story.

Her name is Vanushka and you have to come to Xela to see her. She's a Russian gypsy who can solve your love problems. Visitors stop by all day long. They bring Vanushka gifts and they leave her letters, scribbled pleas, begging for help, like this one, translated into English:

"Dear Vanushka, I ask you with all my heart to please let me know if I am pregnant by my boyfriend. I love him. Please help me get Luis back."

Word is that Vanushka will grant requests like these. After you visit her, your love will come back, your boyfriend will stop cheating on you, your crush will ask you out.

Not that I have any love problems, but I figured I'd pay Vanushka a visit. So I go with a friend to Xela's cemetery.

Vanushka catches my eye right away. She's near the front, in a teal colored tomb the size of a single bed.

That's right, the romance wizard, she lives in a cement box. Vanushka checked out almost a century ago. And now, she's the most visited dead person in town. When I show up, Lillian Perida is standing at her headstone with three red roses:

"We came to the burial of my daughter-in-law's father. We just buried him up there. That's why we came here. The children wanted to come by and leave flowers for Vanushka."

Vanushka's grave is covered in flowers. There are layers of them, colorful new chrysanthemums on top of wilted roses on top of dried flowers. And then there are the letters - touching, desperate, heartfelt graffiti all over her grave, scribbled right onto the teal paint.

"Oh dear Vanushka, all my life I've had bad luck with love. Please help me have good luck in love now and in the future. What is life without love?"

So what are all these people doing pinning their romantic hopes on a corpse? To understand that, you have to know her story. It's a story everyone here knows. My friend Cindi Ochoa, a Xela university student, was the first one to tell it to me:

"She was a gypsy and she fell in love with a Spaniard. They had a romance but then he had to go back to Spain. And she waited for him. She was deeply in love with him. But many years passed and she didn't hear any news about him. She became very sad since the man she loved never came back. One day she became ill and so she died from sadness and love."

Vanushka's headstone reads: "The man I loved in life, his body rests in the motherland of Spain"

Like any good 90 year old legend, this sad story will vary slightly depending on who's doing the telling. When you hear it from older women, Vanushka tends to kill herself, instead of just dying of a broken heart. As kids tell it, it's often the parents that kept the lovers apart, not geography.

But the basics are always the same. Vanushka died in misery, far from her love. And that's where her story ends but the legend in Xela continues.

"After she died people began to tell her story. One day a young woman came to cry by Vanushka's grave. She said that she was suffering just as Vanushka had suffered. Sometime later the woman and her boyfriend got back together."

And so people in Xela began to believe Vanushka had special powers. Eleven-year-old Maria Jose Lopez says she's got hard evidence those powers are real:

"Well, because one of my friends was successful. She got her wish. She asked Vanushka for a boyfriend. So she got a boyfriend and then she got married."

Maria Jose might be convinced but when I hear the letters I can't help but wonder....

"I ask you Vanushka, that Isias returns to me immediately because I don't know how to live without him."

How many of these jilted lovers may share Vanushka's fate?

"If he doesn't come back I don't know if I can go on alone. Don't fail me. Sincerely, Julia."