Book Description

Here is the ultimate historical guidebook for the Spanish Colonial Mission churches, Presidio chapels and asistencias from San Diego to Sonoma, California. As Thomas J. Steele, S.J. said, Donald Toomey has done a major favor to each visitor to any one of the missions of California. These missions -- all of them without exception -- are historic, venerable, and handsome, but they are also profoundly instructive. Donald Toomey has assembled all the basic historical facts of each mission, tracing each site from its late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth-century origin through its various disasters (fires and earthquakes predominate) and its various renovations up to the end of the twentieth century. He outlines each mission's success at achieving its purpose, and he expertly conveys to his reader his own deep appreciation of Provincial Baroque architecture, art, and church life.