Shrine of the Stations of the Cross

The mesa that rises in the middle of San Luis is La Mesa de la Piedad y de la Misericordia, the Hill of Piety and Mercy. In the late 1980s the pastor of Sangre de Cristo Parish, Father Patricio Valdez, set out to build a shrine on it, and parishioners did the work themselves: a trail climbing the mesa past fourteen stations of the cross, each on a pedestal of the valley's volcanic stone, to a fifteenth station of the Resurrection near the top.

The stations are bronzes by Huberto Maestas, a San Luis native who began carving as a boy, trained at Adams State in Alamosa and keeps his studio in town. The figures are three-quarters life size, cast from about 1989 on, and posed in the middle of the action, so that a walker comes on each scene as though it were still happening. In May 1991 the first-edition models of the stations entered the collection of the Vatican Museums.

At the top stands a grotto to Our Lady of Guadalupe with sandstone figures of the Virgin and Juan Diego, and La Capilla de Todos los Santos, an adobe chapel of the mid-1990s by Arnold Valdez with domed bell towers, built in a Spanish and Moorish style. From the mesa top the whole of the old town lies below: the plaza, the church, the strip fields along the People's Ditch and La Vega, the common pasture. The trail is under a mile and steady but not steep, and the parish keeps it open to visitors of any faith.