My Missions Trip, part three

Mission to the Missions

 

 

My third stop, and my final stop, was Mission San Juan. I had originally planned to head down to Mission Espada afterwards, but I was worried about getting back to my car by five o'clock, and decided to skip the last mission for this trip. The church at Mission Espada is currently closed and under renovations, so I decided that checking out the grounds could wait.

 

Mission San Juan is much smaller than the previous two missions.

 

 

 

This beautiful cactus and cross centerpiece greets visitors at the entrance to the grounds. The Mission itself is mostly wide open space, a handful of buildings spread along the edges of a rectangular field.

 

 

The church almost seems like something from a movie set, a building façade rather than an actual active church. But it is active, like the other missions. It's a small narrow building, but even so you can see the care that went into the architecture. 

 

Perhaps the most striking part of Mission San Juan to me was the unfinished church, directly opposite the active one. These ruins are of a church partially built and then abandoned. The grounds of the church in progress then became the graveyard of the Indian residents of the Mission. In respect of the dead, the grounds are off limits.

 

Mission San Juan was the quickest stop on my day out. Aside from walking the square and giving a moment of silence aside the unfinished church/graveyard, I didn't spend much time there. There are, however, nature trails looping the Mission. Due to my time concerns, I didn't explore them, but I fully encourage anyone checking out the area to investigate the trails and let me know how they were.