Junipero Serra statue in Monterey to be reunited with its head

The granite statue of Junipero Serra has stood headless in a Monterey park ever since October, when an apparent protester used a sledgehammer to decapitate the image of the 18th century priest.

But now it appears the Lower Presidio Historic Park sculpture will soon be reunited with its missing noggin.

Monterey authorities announced over the weekend that a young girl had discovered the head while wading in a tidal pool.

“We’re ecstatic that the head has been found,” said Willard McCrone, of the Old Monterey Foundation.

Officers recovered the vandalized likeness around 3:30 p.m. Saturday, after the girl spotted it at low tide, near the Coast Guard Pier, according to Sgt. Ron Blair of the Monterey Police Department.

The Old Monterey Foundation had been raising funds to restore the statue and had estimated the cost at around $77,000, McCrone said.

The cost of having a professional sculptor chisel a replacement head accounted for much of that expense, according to McCrone, the secretary to the foundation’s board of directors.

“Now that we have a head, it should be considerably less expensive,” he said of the restoration work.

With the head’s recovery, the total job should run somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000, he said.

The decapitation followed Pope Francis’ canonization of Serra on Sept. 23. Serra, a friar who brought Catholicism to California, has been criticized by many for his harsh treatment of Native Americans.

Authorities said it appeared vandals used a sledgehammer to break the Serra statue at the neck.

The restoration project would seek to reattach the head “in a manner that it cannot be so easily vandalized in the future,” McCrone said.

The statue was erected in 1891, McCrone said, and “has been there all this time without any vandalism.”

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