Old California, Missions and Murals

The first California mission is not in California but in Mexico, halfway down the long desert peninsula we call Baja California. Once that land, too, was called California, after the legend of an island inhabited by Amazons whose weapons were made of gold. But when Jesuit missionaries arrived from Mexico City in the late 17th century, what they found were nomadic Indians and a landscape of searing beauty--and, in their mind, poverty. “What is California?” wrote one of the priests in a letter home, “. . . to quote the scripture, a pathless, waterless, thornful rock. . . .”

But neither drought, flood, locust plagues nor Indian resistance to evangelization deterred the Jesuits. In 71 years--until their expulsion from Spain’s Latin American colonies in 1768--the Jesuits established a chain of 18 missions covering more than half the 806-mile length of Baja California. Franciscans took up their work, then handed the missions to the Dominicans five years later.

Most of the missions were made of adobe with thatched roofs. When abandoned, they melted back into the ground. Others, made of stone and brick, have long been dismantled, and still others were rebuilt by the Dominicans.

But a few remain--among them, the original mission church at Loreto, and that most handsome of all, nestled into a high mountain oasis, the stark and fortress-like San Francisco Javier de Vigge-Biaundo.

The pre-Conquest Indians left some of the most remarkable cave paintings in the world, comparable in their haunting evocation of movement and power to the European sites at Altamira and Lascaux.

I was exploring the peninsula early this year as part of my research for a book on Baja California and its hidden treasures--the ones most people miss when they bomb down the Transpeninsular Highway to go surfing and fishing or just lie in the sun.

I had flown into Loreto from Mexico City, where I have been living for the last 10 years. It’s true I speak Spanish and that was a great help, but many people in Baja speak English, and their quiet formality and friendliness usually make it easy to get around.

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“Cabeza y Madre de las Misiones de Baja y Alta California” proclaims the stone engraving above the door to Loreto’s church: “Head and Mother of the California Missions.” It’s only a short walk to the beach where Father Juan Maria Salvatierra landed with his band of priests and soldiers in 1697. The first few days were inauspicious: Hundreds of Cochimi Indians attacked with rocks and arrows. The priests and their soldiers opened fire with harquebuses and a mortar. But within days, the hungry Cochimi were pacified with gruel ladled out from an immense copper kettle. Meals were followed by the Jesuits’ attempts to proselytize.

The church is small, with a domed bell tower and a luscious confection of an altar. One of the many effigies is the original Virgin of Loreto, which Father Salvatierra carried with him from Mexico City. The building has been heavily restored: A chubasco--what the locals call a hurricane--leveled the town in 1829.

Next door is the Museum of the Missions with its thoughtful display of historic items, many priceless. There is a great copper kettle--as big as a hot tub--which the missionaries used to cook the Indians’ gruel; Chinese chests and porcelain spice jars, gifts to the priests from passing Manila galleons (treasure ships en route from Manila in the Spanish colony of the Philippines); oil paintings, darkened with age, of Virgins and saints.

Later, I walked the length of Loreto’s malecon, the long waterfront lined with benches, and protecting the shore, great piles of cement-block riprap. Pelicans dive-bombed into the silvery water; terns wheeled overhead. Their cries and honks filled the air, which felt light and smelled faintly metallic.

Isla del Carmen stretched out in the distance, its mountains an ethereal rosy-gray in the fading sun. The Cochimis believed that when they died, their souls would go there to rest.

The next day I decided to go to the mission of San Francisco Javier de Vigge-Biaundo in the little town of San Javier. I drove west into the Sierra de la Giganta on a graded dirt road, the tires of my car spitting back gravel. Soon the road began to rise, running in places along sheer canyon walls.

Everywhere there were cactuses, rooted even in the rock, in the thinnest pockets of soil: cardon, tall as giants; thorny twists of cholla; fat little barrel cactuses crowned with flame-colored flowers; and pitahayas--a low-growing cactus famed for its delicious seed-laden fruit. For the Indians, pitahaya season, which follows the rains of late summer, was a bacchanalia of gorging on the juicy crimson pulp.

Occasionally I saw settlements tucked near a thread of water, ranchos of one or two families with their adobe buildings, corrals made of twiggy little palo de arco branches. Always, there were dogs and a rusty-looking truck; sometimes, a few goats, or a mule tied to a post. Hawks floated overhead on the thermals.

After about an hour and a half I arrived at San Javier, which does not have a plaza, but a wide avenue flanked by thatch-roofed adobes, many of them abandoned (the more modern houses--cinderblocks with satellite dishes on their roofs--are on the outskirts of town).

At the end of the avenue is the Moorish-style stone church, that perfectly proportioned jewel of Jesuit architecture built by Father Miguel del Barco with Indian labor in 1759.

The mission was founded in 1699 by a Sicilian priest named Francesco Piccolo. Father Piccolo and his escort of soldiers built the first adobe chapel, and according to Jesuit protocol, began cooking up pots of gruel to attract the Indians to catechism.

Inside the church, Baroque flourishes (stone rosettes, carved arches, a gilded altar) are offset by the simplicity of whitewashed walls and hand-hewn wooden benches. When I visited, the church was empty but for an old man who sat at the edge of a pew, snoozing.

With the exception of a handful of remnant communities in the northern mountains, Baja’s Indians are gone now, victims of smallpox, influenza and typhoid.

The people of central Baja are for the most part descendants of the soldiers of the mission presidios and later immigrants from the mainland--ranchers, fishermen and miners.

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The highway from Loreto to Mulege skirts the 25-mile-long Bahia de Concepcion, its mirror-smooth navy blue water reflecting the sky. The town begins just north of the bay at El Sombrerito, a hat-shaped hill at the mouth of the Rio Santa Rosalia.

Santa Rosalia de Mulege is a pretty little stone church up on a bluff. It was built by the Dominicans; the original mission church, founded in 1705, was on the river and swept away in a chubasco.

The ancestors of the local Indians were “the painters,” hunters who ventured down from the north to the remote caves of Baja’s central mountains.

They left thousands of paintings, ranging from squiggles and sketches to sprawling murals of snakes and deer, eagles and turtles, fish and stingrays, and rabbits and mountain sheep. But above all, they painted men in black or red, and half black and half red, some pierced with arrows, others menacing: big-shouldered, arms raised. Some wear headdresses. Some are small as handprints, but many are enormous and placed high out of reach on cliff overhangs 10, 20, 30 feet up.

Researchers believe “the painters” worked relatively recently, from about AD 500 to 1500. To reach the ceilings and overhangs, they would have used scaffolding made of cardon cactuses or tree trunks lashed together with palm fronds.

Baja’s cave paintings are clustered in three major areas, together known as the Great Mural Region: Sierra San Borja in the north; Sierra de San Francisco; and in the Mulege area, the Sierra de Guadalupe. None of these sites may be visited without a guide licensed by the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History. In Mulege I found a guide through the Hacienda Hotel and arranged a trip to San Borjitas.

For nearly three hours the high-clearance truck jolted over loose rocks, cactuses and scrubby trees tearing at its sides. We saw only one other vehicle, a pickup heading into town. Every half-hour to 40 minutes we passed a ranch. One hardscrabble goat ranch was named--aptly--El Perdido, “The Lost.”

At last, we pulled up to an empty corral. We began to hike--careful to avoid rattlesnakes and cowpatties--climbing along the edge of a slow-moving creek. The only noise was a soft burble of water and the buzzing of flies and wasps. In 15 minutes I stood at the mouth of a deep cave, its ceiling arrayed with the figures of huge red and black men, some impaled with arrows, their arms and legs overpainted, figure upon figure, memories--or intentions?

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The Cochimis of an inland oasis called Kadakaaman (Creek of Reeds) came to visit Father Piccolo at Mulege. They invited him to visit, and in the year 1716, with a contingent of soldiers and neophytes, he did. Mission San Ignacio Kadakaaman was founded in 1728.

It would have been a long hard trek across open desert for the priests and Indians. Always, its looming presence like an admonition, there is the great barren cone of the Volcan de Tres Virgenes. (The Jesuits reported an eruption in 1746.)

Now, however, San Ignacio is only a 2 1/2 hour drive on the highway, passing through Santa Rosalia, a Wild West-style town of wooden buildings (the wood shipped in from Washington State) famous for the French Compagnie du Boleo’s played-out copper mines.

Santa Rosalia also is known for its prefabricated iron church, designed by Gustave Eiffel and exhibited with the Eiffel Tower at the 1889 Paris World Exposition. Intended for service in France’s equatorial colonies, the church had been stashed, long forgotten in a Brussels warehouse, when a Compagnie du Boleo employee purchased it, had it sent to Santa Rosalia and reassembled.

San Ignacio huddles in the shadows of a thicket of date palms watered by underground springs. The church of San Ignacio--one of Baja’s most elegant--was built on the site of the original Jesuit mission by the Dominicans in 1786.

The Jesuit influence remains, however, in both the name and the effigy on the main altar: San Ignacio de Loyola (St. Ignatius of Loyola), the founder of the Jesuit Order.

In its annex are a well-appointed museum and an office of the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History, where I obtained permission for a day trip to the Cuesta Palmarito cave-painting site near Rancho Santa Martha. A high-clearance taxi van brought me up to the ranch--another jolting ride of about 2 1/2 hours through a wilderness of cactus and rocky bluffs.

The hike to the cave paintings was a strenuous 1 1/2 hours over rock-strewn trails, dry rocky arroyos, cactuses clawing at my legs--and then a long steep climb over loose dirt and rubble. All the while, I could hear the clank and tinkle of goat bells.

The site was more an overhang than a cave, thickly crowded with red and black figures, high above. Their arms were raised, as if in surrender.

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GUIDEBOOK

On a Baja Mission

Getting there: From LAX to Loreto, fly nonstop on Aero California; round-trip fares begin at about $218 including tax. You can drive down from the border, or rent a car or Jeep in Loreto at Thrifty or Budget.

To see the cave paintings: To visit rock art sites in the Sierra de San Francisco, you must first obtain permission in the offices of the National Institute of Anthropology and History, next to the church in San Ignacio; telephone and fax 011-52-115-40222. (Some sites involve three to five days of traveling by mule and camping, for which you also must make a reservation here.) Once permission is obtained, guides can be hired in Santa Martha and San Francisco de la Sierra. (Note: Passenger cars may not be able to make it to the ranches.) Fisher Turismo on San Ignacio’s main plaza (tel. 011-52-115-40150) offers taxi service with high-clearance vans to Rancho Santa Martha and Rancho San Francisco; cost is about $120.

In the Mulege area (San Borjita, La Trinidad), you do not need to visit the INAH offices, but you must hire an authorized guide in town. Prices for a one-day tour range $30 to $55 per person, depending on the number of people.

Where to stay: Loreto: Diamond Eden, a full service resort five miles south of Loreto at Nopolo; tel. 011-52-113-30700; double $240, single $170, all inclusive. Adults only, clothing-optional beach. Hotel Plaza Loreto, centrally located on the Paseo Hidalgo No. 2; tel. 011-52-113-50280; about $45 per night, double occupancy. Las Trojes (The Graineries), tel. 011-52-113-50277; a quirky little bed and breakfast on the beach (the breakfast is mediocre); $52 per night, double occupancy.

Mulege: Hotel Hacienda, Calle Madero No. 3; tel. 011-52-115-30021; $25 per night, double. No frills, a pool and restaurant, in an old colonial building with a large courtyard; can be noisy.

San Ignacio: Hotel La Pinta, tel. (800) 336-5454; clean, comfortable, good restaurant, swimming pool, a short walk from the plaza through a grove of date palms; about $70 per night.