San Francisco Javier de Viggé-Biaundó Mission

It is considered "The jewel of the missions of Baja California", its façade is modest in the baroque style, where the beautiful ogee arch door, the ornaments in the choir window and the simple buttresses that frame it stand out. Inside it preserves a magnificent baroque style altarpiece, made of carved and gilded wood, dedicated to Saint Francis Xavier, whose image is accompanied by five excellent oil paintings with religious images. Established as a mission on March 10, (1699), the first construction was an adobe chapel with an attached house for the resident father Francisco María Píccolo. The mission site built at the Ojo de Agua de Biaundó, thirty-one kilometers southwest of Loreto, was abandoned by an attack by hostile indigenous people. In 1701 the mission was reestablished on the current site by Father Juan Ugarte, who began the cultivation of wheat, corn, beans, vines, and fruit trees through the construction of irrigation canals and ponds to store water. The missionary building, built of stone taken from the quarries of the Arroyo de Santo Domingo, was built by the Jesuit missionary Padre Miguel del Barco in 1744, completed and blessed approximately in April 1758. According to Miguel del Barco, "because the ancient ilgesia was threatening ruin, another one began to be manufactured in 1744", although this manufacture had several interruptions of some years "due to the difficulty of finding a satisfactory teacher who wanted to come to remote lands" It is all of lime and stone with very firm foundations and walls, all of good vaults with its transept and well-made half orange, with three altarpieces on its altars.