Socorro Mission (Nuestra Senora de la Limpia Concepcion del Socorro)

The church at Socorro is built directly on the ground and made entirely of adobe, with walls about five feet thick at the base. Its nave runs 100 feet long and 22 feet wide under a ceiling 26 feet high. Overhead, some of the carved vigas, the roof beams, are thought to have been salvaged from an earlier church after a flood. The bell tower was added in 1847, and the east and west sacristies after 1880.

In 1838 the town chose Saint Michael as its co-patron, beside Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, and his life-size statue stands inside. Church records say a Holguin family gave it, but the story told in Socorro is that merchants hauling the statue by ox cart from Mexico City to Santa Fe got stuck in the mud here, the oxen refused to go on, and the saint was understood to have chosen his home.

The church nearly did not survive the twentieth century. Between 1923 and 1936 its walls were coated in Portland cement, which trapped moisture in the adobe, and by the 1990s an east wall was beginning to fail. From 1998 to 2005 the La Purisima Restoration Committee and Cornerstones Community Partnerships stripped the cement, replastered the walls in mud and lime, mended the vigas and corbels, laid a stone floor and steadied the bell tower. Interns from K.E.Y.S. Academy in Socorro, with instructors and volunteers, made about 12,000 adobes for the work. The church was rededicated in September 2005. It is a working parish, so visit outside service times.