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Built in 1940 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado's exploration of the Southwest, this church is the largest Spanish adobe structure in the United States and is considered by many the finest example of Pueblo-style architecture anywhere. Its hand-carved stone reredos, taken from the older part of the Cathedral of St. Frances of Assisi, dates from 1761. The church was constructed in the old-fashioned way by parishioners, who mixed the more than 200,000 mud-and-straw adobe bricks and hauled them into place. The 225-ton stone reredos (altar screen) is...

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Step through an unassuming doorway from Cathedral Place and you enter the Lamy Garden. This small oasis is a remnant of the four acre garden established by Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy in the 1860's. Pass through the garden to the entrance to the Archdiocese of Santa Fe Museum, established in 1993. This museum is an outgrowth of the Archdiocese Office of Historic Patrimony and Archives and displays some of the history of the Catholic Church in Northern New Mexico.

The museum displays historic artifacts and religious artworks including painted altar screens (reredos), wooden statues...

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

On Old Santa Fe Trail, just around the corner from St. Francis Cathedral, stands the small Gothic church known as the Loretto Chapel. Home to the famous “miraculous staircase,” the chapel was built in the 1870s for the Sisters of Loretto, a Kentucky-based teaching order who were the first to respond to Bishop Jean-Baptiste’s plea (he wrote reported wrote hundreds of letters) for teachers to found schools in the wild west of Santa Fe. Imagine these nuns traveling by boat and covered wagon over the Santa Fe Trail, with the Bishop himself teaching them Spanish along the way. The dusty streets...

Tuesday, January 15, 2008
by Annie Lux • SantaFe.com

Is San Miguel Chapel really the oldest church in the United States? It’s hard to say for sure, of course, but if you accept its 1610 building date, it’s certainly in the running.

San Miguel Chapel was, in fact, built around that time, by a group of Tlexcalan Indians who came from Mexico with the first Spanish settlement party. They settled here, on the south bank of the Santa Fe River, in what is now known as Santa Fe’s oldest neighborhood, the Barrio de Analco. When the Spanish moved their own capital to Santa Fe in 1609, they worshipped at San Miguel until their own parish church was...

Tuesday, January 15, 2008
by Annie Lux • SantaFe.com

The little town of Chimayó was settled in the late 1700s by Spanish families who gathered around several small enclosed plaza (the better to guard against attacks from nomadic Indian tribes). The area became known for its apple orchards and the beautiful weavings down by these families from the wool of their own sheep—a skill that has been handed down through the generations, as attested to by the many family-owned weaving shops that still dot the area’s roadsides.

At one of these plaza enclaves, known as El Potrero, lived the prosperous Abeyta family. The story goes that in the year...

Tuesday, January 15, 2008
by Annie Lux • SantaFe.com

One of Santa Fe’s most familiar landmarks is the St. Francis Cathedral (officially the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi) at the eastern end of San Francisco Street. Thousands of visitors flock to the grand stone edifice towering (well, for Santa Fe) over the downtown historic district. Are you wondering why, in a city founded (at least in part) by Franciscan missionaries, such an important building isn’t on the Santa Fe Plaza? The answer is that it was—at least, the first two parish churches, built on the same spot, were. In the days before the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, the plaza was...

Tuesday, January 15, 2008
by Annie Lux • SantaFe.com