Mission San Xavier del Bac — church building
Keyany · CC BY-SA 4.0

Mission San Xavier del Bac

  • 2 min read
  • 32.107° N 111.008° W

Interesting facts

  • Its gleaming white walls earned the mission the nickname "White Dove of the Desert".
  • The east tower never received the dome and lantern of its twin, probably because money ran out; tales of a fatal fall or a tax loophole lack documentary support.
  • Conservators have counted at least 183 different angels in the church's interior decoration.
  • The walls are of locally fired adobe brick filled with basalt rock, about six feet thick in the towers.
  • Restoration since 1992 has been led in part by a Tohono O'odham conservator trained by specialists from Rome, and about $14 million was spent over 32 years.
  • Visiting in 1852, the boundary commissioner John Russell Bartlett found the grandest church in Sonora standing among humble mud and straw huts.
  • Willa Cather featured the mission in her 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, where a priest praises it as the continent's most beautiful church.
  • The exterior appeared in the 1979 television miniseries Salem's Lot, standing in for a fictional church in Guatemala.
  • Each year on the Friday after Easter, the San Xavier Festival brings a torch-lit procession of Tohono O'odham and Yaqui tribal members.
  • Kino's diary records that the first church's foundations were laid in April 1700 with volcanic tezontle stone hauled from a small hill nearby.

Why it is worth it

Mission San Xavier del Bac rises out of the flat desert south of Tucson like something misplaced from central Mexico: a white facade flanked by two towers, a dome over the crossing, and a richly carved entrance set into otherwise plain lime-washed walls. Seen across the flat floor of the Santa Cruz valley, it is a startling sight. It is the oldest European building in Arizona and is widely regarded as the finest Spanish colonial church in the United States.

The mission was founded in 1692 by the Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino in an O'odham settlement the people themselves called Wa:k, the "water place", for the springs that once surfaced here. Kino's first church, begun in 1700 a couple of miles away, never fared well: Apache raids interrupted the work, and by 1770 it had been destroyed. The present church was raised between 1783 and 1797 by the Franciscans Juan Bautista Velderrain and Juan Bautista Llorenz, who borrowed 7,000 pesos from a Sonoran rancher and hired the architect Ignacio Gaona; the labour was O'odham. Walls, arches and vaults are of fired brick, stone and lime mortar, and the dome above the transept rises about 16 m on arches and squinches.

The surprise is inside. Through heavy carved mesquite doors the light drops, the air cools, and every surface turns to colour: polychrome saints in niches, painted curtains and false doors, scrolls, shells and angels in a theatrical Baroque that seems to play with the walls themselves. Much of the sculpture is thought to have been made by craftsmen from Querétaro and carried north by mule. Left without a resident priest in 1837, the church was cared for by the O'odham themselves until services resumed in 1859; the Franciscans returned in 1913 and still serve the parish today, and a long conservation campaign since the 1990s has been cleaning the paintings and stripping away cement coatings that had trapped moisture in the old walls. The mission stands on the San Xavier reservation of the Tohono O'odham Nation and remains their church as much as a monument — it was made a National Historic Landmark in 1960.

Getting there

The mission is at 1950 W San Xavier Road, about 15 km (9–10 miles) south of downtown Tucson; Drexel Heights, the nearest community, is about 4 km away. Tucson International Airport (TUS) is only about 7 km away in a straight line. A car is the practical way to reach it.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Arizona 18The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Beautiful Churches in the United States 6The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in the United States 10The Most Beautiful Churches 186The Most Beautiful Sacred Places 623

From the encyclopaedia

Mission San Xavier del Bac is a historic Spanish Catholic mission about 10 miles (16 km) south of downtown Tucson, Arizona, on the Tohono O'odham Nation San Xavier Indian Reservation. The mission was founded in 1692 by Eusebio Kino in the center of a centuries-old settlement of the Sobaipuri O'odham, a branch of the Akimel or River O'odham located along the banks of the Santa Cruz River. The mission was named for Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuit Order in Europe. The original church was built to the north of the later Franciscan church and was demolished during an Apache raid in 1770.

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32.10700, -111.00800per Wikidata