San Francisco de Asis Mission Church — church building
Liveon001 © Travis K. Witt · CC BY-SA 3.0

San Francisco de Asis Mission Church

  • 1 min read
  • 36.359° N 105.608° W

Interesting facts

  • The church was built around 1815 under Fray José Benito Pereyro, the priest of Taos Pueblo, who agreed to serve the Spanish settlers.
  • It stands at the heart of a fortified plaza whose houses, with defensive towers, were almost finished by 1779 as protection against Comanche raids.
  • In 1840 the traveller Matt Field described about 300 houses built wall to wall around a large square, with the church in the middle.
  • Its roof beams, or vigas, sit on doubled corbels and are spaced more closely than in most Spanish colonial churches.
  • Besides Ansel Adams and Paul Strand, the photographer Ned Scott also made a series of pictures of the church.
  • Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings include an unusual view of a fragment of the church silhouetted against the sky.
  • A 1982 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe was devoted entirely to images of this one church, about 80 of them.

Why it is worth it

Seen from behind, the church of San Francisco de Asís in Ranchos de Taos is a sculpture in earth: massive adobe buttresses swell out from the apse and transepts in soft, rounded forms that catch the high New Mexico light. This view has attracted artists for a century. Georgia O'Keeffe painted the church several times and called it one of the most beautiful buildings left in the United States by the early Spaniards, and Ansel Adams and Paul Strand made some of their best-known photographs of it.

The church was built by Franciscans in the Spanish Colonial tradition, with construction usually dated between about 1772 and 1816. It has a cruciform plan roughly 120 feet long, and its thick walls of sun-dried mud brick are covered with earthen plaster. Because adobe erodes with rain and snow, the surface has to be renewed regularly, and every year members of the parish and community gather to replaster the church by hand - a tradition that keeps both the building and its craft alive.

The church remains a working Catholic parish of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, dedicated to Saint Francis of Assisi. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970. Ranchos de Taos is a small community just south of the town of Taos in northern New Mexico.

Getting there

The church is in Ranchos de Taos, about 4 miles (6 km) south of Taos. The nearest airport is Taos Regional Airport (TSM), about 12 km away; Santa Fe lies about 80 km to the south.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in New Mexico 11The 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

San Francisco de Asís Parish Church is an historic and architecturally significant Catholic church in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico in the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. During the 18th century, it was the center of a small Spanish and Native American agricultural community. The current church was constructed between 1772 and 1816.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

36.35860, -105.60800per Wikidata