Unlike most of the string of missions founded by the Franciscan order in the 1700s, most of which have and use at least parts of their original buildings, the Santa Cruz mission has only one building surviving of its original thirty-two.
And that building, seen at top, was not even one of the mission’s major buildings—not the chapel, nor the quarters of the heads of the mission. It was, in fact, a dormitory for indigenous people held to labor in the mission’s fields and to be converted to its faith. It’s now a museum and gift shop.
This second building offers a view of what the mission church looked like, but it is a scaled-down replica, built in the 1930s. It serves as a chapel to the Holy Cross Church (same name, really!) that was built in 1889 on the ruins of the original Mission chapel after it was destroyed in an 1857 earthquake.
