Mission San Xavier del Bac

Ten miles south of Tucson, a white Baroque church rises out of the flat desert like a mirage that refused to dissolve. This is San Xavier del Bac — the White Dove of the Desert — widely judged the finest Spanish Colonial building in the United States, and it is not a museum but a working parish, the church of the Tohono O'odham community of Wa:k on whose land it stands.

The mission is old, and the building only a little less so. Father Kino, the Jesuit who threaded a chain of missions up the Santa Cruz, rode into the O'odham village of Wa:k in 1692 and began the work. The church you see came later: after Spain expelled the Jesuits, the Franciscan Juan Bautista Velderrain financed it against a crop of wheat not yet planted, hired the architect Ignacio Gaona, and set a large O'odham workforce to building it between 1783 and 1797 — finished, remarkably, before George Washington left office. A friar who visited in 1793 wrote that it rivaled the most beautiful churches in Mexico. It is limewashed brilliant white, carved with a Baroque intensity of shells, scrolls, and saints, and topped by two octagonal bell towers, one of which was never finished; the reasons are lost, and the asymmetry has become part of its face.

Inside, the original Spanish colonial statues and murals survive in a density found nowhere else in the country, and generations of Tohono O'odham craftspeople have led the painstaking restoration that keeps them. That is the thing to understand about San Xavier: the people who raised it in the 1790s are the same people who maintain it and worship in it now. It has been their church, without a break, for more than two centuries — the oldest intact European building in Arizona and the living heart of a community at once.