The Mission at San Javier
Baja California Sur, Mexico
The Jesuit fathers founded the mission at San Javier in 1699. The impressive stone church was begun in the 1740's and stands intact today, never having been renovated or rebuilt. A local family takes responsibility for it, and, when we visited, a woman showed us around, let us sign the guest book, and accepted a donation to the church maintenance fund.
The church at San Javier is especially striking because of its remote location, high in the mountains west of Loreto. Even today it requires an hour or so of dirt road driving from the highway near Loreto, or much longer from any other direction. The village consists of a single street with a scattering of houses -- perhaps a hundred people live there now. Water is brought through a plastic pipe, laid on top of the old stone aqueduct, to walled gardens in the village. There is said to be a 200 year old grapevine in one of them.