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The expansive San Juan Capistrano Mission was initially a small adobe chapel when it was established by Padre Junípero Serra on November 1, 1776. It was the second of 21 Spanish missions founded along the coast of California in the 18th and 19th centuries. (...)

The expansive San Juan Capistrano Mission was initially a small adobe chapel when it was established by Padre Junípero Serra on November 1, 1776. It was the second of 21 Spanish missions founded along the coast of California in the 18th and 19th centuries. The congregation of San Juan Capistrano expanded rapidly over the next 20 years, and in 1797, master stonemason Isidoro Aguílar began the work of replacing the mission’s modest chapel with a colossal sandstone church designed to hold 1,300 people. The neoclassical church was laid out in the shape of a Latin cross with an 85 ft wide transept and 167 ft long nave; its roof was formed by eight shallow domes and topped by a 120-foot bell tower. Construction was completed by 1806, but on December 8, 1812, a violent earthquake caused the bell tower to collapse, killing 49 worshippers inside the church. That first catastrophic event began a tumultuous period in the history of the church. Only six years later, French pirates torched several of the mission’s peripheral structures. After the declaration of Mexican Independence in 1821, the government expelled the Spanish from California and seized the mission for secular purposes. After the land it was on became part of the United States, the mission was returned to the Catholic Church in 1865 by Abraham Lincoln in a presidential decree. Since then conservation efforts on the structure have been inadequate, leaving the monument in ruins.