Tumacacori

On Tuesday, January 15, after spending much of the day at the Sonora Desert Museum, I had only a few hours to see a little more of southern Arizona. So many of the places of interest were several hours away, and there just wasn’t time, so I settled on Tumacacori National Historic Site:

http://www.nps.gov/tuma/

This turned out to be very interesting. It is the ruins of a Spanish colonial Franciscan mission, built between 1800 and 1822 and never finished. The official web page gives more information than I could relate here, so I will just display a few photos that I took. This was the official end to my 2007-2008 Team in Training efforts, as I drove back to Phoenix the next day and caught a flight back to Richmond.

Here is a view of the front of the church. 90,000 adobe blocks were needed to build the church, and stone had to be quarried and timber felled in the mountains, many miles away through dry and dangerous Apache territory:

Interior of the remains of the church:

View of the church's dome on the right and bell tower on the left:

This is an adobe hut that some of the Indian converts and laborers would have lived in:

A good view of the bell tower: