Journey Through Spanish Missions Country
From San Antonio, Texas, to San Juan Capistrano, California
By: Johnny D. Boggs 03/01/2009
Historic El Paso
Another mission destination in Texas is El Paso, where the city’s mission trail takes visitors to landmarks such as Ysleta, Socorro and San Elizario. Ysleta, founded as a refugee camp during the Pueblo Revolt in the late 1600s, is the oldest, continuously-used Roman Catholic church in the nation. La Misión de Corpus Christi de San Antonio de la Ysleta del Sur was made of adobe with a tin-roofed bell tower in 1682, but floods and fires over time led to several updates, with the last major reconstruction taking place in 1908.
Restored in 2005, Mission Socorro—Nuestra Señora de Limpia Concepción de los Piros de Socorro del Sur (Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception of the Piros of Socorro of the South)—was also born after the 1680 revolt when Piro Indian and Spanish families were forced to find a new home and place of worship.
Also on El Paso’s Mission Trail is the 1882 chapel at San Elizario, probably the fourth church to serve the presidio. Capilla de San Elcear and the presidio were originally built in 1789. Today, the village of San Elizario also offers a great self-guided walking tour through the historic district. Billy the Kid buffs know that the Kid is said to have broken his pal, Melquiades Segura, out of Stop No. 6, the Old County Jail. If a chapel parishioner tells me it happened, I’m not going to say otherwise.
New Mexico In Ruins
From El Paso, it’s off to check out the missions, and ruins of missions, scattered across New Mexico. Socorro became a stop on El Camino Real in 1598, and construction on Nuestra Señora de Perpetuo Socorro, the first Catholic mission in the area, began in 1615. The mission was probably completed in 1626, although another wing was added to what’s now known as Old San Miguel Mission in 1853.
Spanish Franciscans built other missions for the Piro Pueblos during this time, and those ruins can be found at the Quarai, Abó and Gran Quivira sites of Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument near Mountainair. By the 1670s, however, drought had forced the abandonment of the pueblos and the missions. Mass and fiestas are occasionally held at the sites, and visitors during Heritage Preservation Week each May can get down and dirty, and learn what really goes into stabilizing ruins.
More impressive might be the ruins at Pecos National Historic Park, where a 1.25-mile, self-guided trail from the visitors center leads to the ruins of Pecos Pueblo and Mission Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles de Porciúncula de los Pecos, built in the early 1600s. The mission was destroyed during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 but rebuilt after the Spanish returned in the 1690s. In 1838, the last holdouts of Pecos Pueblo, numbering only 17, abandoned their home and moved to Jemez Pueblo.
Which brings us to Jemez State Monument, where the ruins of the circa-1610 San José de los Jemez church stand alongside the ruins of a 500-year-old Indian village in the inspiring San Diego Cañon. In August, nearby Jemez Pueblo commemorates the 1680 revolt, where the emphasis is on blessings and “mutual understanding.”
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