Tumacacori National Historical Park, Arizona, United StatesToday's NPS site is Tumacácori National Historical Park, the site of a Spanish Catholic Mission for several hundred years.
The link above will take you to the park website, and the video is right at the top of the page. That will tell you everything you want to know about the history of the site.
The people who originally inhabited the site are the O'odham (sometimes known as Pima people). When the Spaniards arrived, they saw the O'odham as future citizens of New Spain, and they set about indoctrinating them into Catholocism. The first priest was a Jesuit, Padre Eusebio Kino, who was seen as being very kindly, and who is still remembered very well today. Eventually, King Charles III of Spain came to believe the Jesuits wanted to kill him, and he had them all arrested--including those in New Spain. After that, Franciscans were sent in in their place, and it was under Franciscan control that the big church, which remains on the site, was built. The whole site was abandoned in 1848, and was left to fall into ruins for 60 years.
In 1908, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the Tumacacori Mission a National Historical Park, and restoration began.
The restoration work has been mostly stabalizing and preserving--the church has not been restored to its pre-evacuation condition. There's a very interesting walking tour of the site, and we enjoyed our time there.
After lunch at a nearby Italian restaurant, we headed back into downtown Tuscon to visit the Southern Arizona Transportation Museum, which focuses on train travel through Tuscon. This is a small museum, but has some interesting exhibits. One of the things I learned there is that the source of the name "Tucson" is "Stjukson," which is the name of the little farming community where the O'odham lived when Padre Kino visited them. It means: "At the foot of the black hills."
There's also a locomotive on site: it was given to the museum by the city of Tucson in 1955, when steam trains were discontinued in desert areas because of the huge amount of water they required. They've been working on restoring the locomotive ever since--lots more work to be done.
Dinner was at a restaurant called Indian Twist, in walking distance from our hotel. If you're in Tucson and staying near the airport, we can recommend it.
Tomorrow we'll go to the eastern unit of Saguaro National Park.
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2025-05-22