The California Missions: History, Art and Preservation

The story of the Spanish missions is one of the epics in the history of California. Founded in the late eighteenth century by Franciscan missionaries, designed by artisans from Mexico and Europe, and built and decorated largely by Native Americans, the missions were complex institutions of colonial industry, where European and indigenous cultures mingled and European technologies took root in new soil. Secularized and largely abandoned in the 1830s and 1840s, the missions fell into decline,...