Misión San Javier

The drive to Misión San Javier from Loreto covers barely twenty miles, but it takes close to an hour and a half on a dirt road that switchbacks up through the Sierra de la Giganta, past dry riverbeds and cactus forest, before dropping unexpectedly into a narrow canyon lined with date palms, orange trees, and pomegranates fed by a spring that has run continuously since long before the Jesuits arrived. I had been warned the road was rough. I had not been warned it would be one of the most beautiful drives of my life.

The mission itself, completed in 1758, is built of volcanic stone quarried locally and is widely considered the best-preserved Jesuit mission church in Baja California, having survived the earthquakes, floods, and abandonment that destroyed most of its contemporaries. Its facade has a restrained baroque elegance that feels almost out of place at the end of such a punishing road — carved stone columns, a bell tower catching the afternoon light, an interior still holding some of its original altar pieces. I sat in the cool, dim nave for a long while, grateful simply for the temperature difference after the drive.

The village around the mission is tiny — a few dozen families, most descended from the original mission workers, still farming the same terraced plots using irrigation channels the Jesuits engineered nearly three centuries ago. An older woman selling preserves outside the church, made from the oranges and figs grown in the canyon, told me her family had never left San Javier, generation after generation working the same narrow strip of green in an otherwise unforgiving landscape. I bought a jar of fig preserves that did not survive the drive back to Loreto.

When to go: October through April, both for cooler driving conditions on the dirt road and to avoid summer flash flood risk in the canyon. Early morning departures from Loreto give you the best light at the mission before midday heat sets in.