Misión San Javier

Misión San Francisco Javier de Viggé-Biaundó, founded in 1699 as the second mission in the Californias and moved to its present site in the Sierra de la Giganta in 1720, is generally regarded as the best-preserved Jesuit mission church in Baja California Sur and one of the most intact in the Americas. The stone church visitors see was begun in 1744 under the direction of Father Miguel del Barco and consecrated in 1759, a fifteen-year build using volcanic rock quarried nearby and lime mortar burned on site. Because the mission sits in a narrow palm oasis 36km inland from Loreto, reached until recently only by a rough mountain track, it escaped the hurricane damage, secularisation looting, and 19th-century rebuilding that altered most other Baja missions. The result is an unusually coherent example of Jesuit Baroque provincial architecture: a cruciform plan with a dome over the crossing, a carved facade with paired pilasters and a shell niche, deeply splayed stone window surrounds, and an interior retablo of gilded wood dating from the mid-18th century with painted panels of San Francisco Javier. The original wooden choir loft and several 18th-century oil paintings remain in place. Behind the church, terraced irrigation works built by the missionaries still water an orchard that includes an olive tree planted in the 1700s and grapevines descended from mission stock — the agricultural half of the mission complex, which is rare survival elsewhere. Restoration work by Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia has focused on stabilising the stonework and the dome rather than on reconstruction, so the fabric is overwhelmingly original. San Javier remains a working church for the small village around it, and the feast of San Francisco Javier on 3 December draws pilgrims who walk the mountain road from Loreto. The paved road from Loreto now makes the drive through the Sierra de la Giganta, with its canyon walls and cardón forest, a scenic route in its own right.