This is the unrestored Mission San Jose de Tumacacori church located along the Santa Cruz River, 19 miles north of the Mexican border and 45 miles south of Tucson, Arizona. Front of Church Information: (Source: Tumacacori National Historical Park, U.S. Department of the Interior). The facade of the church was painted with bright colors. Today, in the doorway and under the cornice below the window, some of the original color is still visible. The half circle of the espadana, or pediment, is a reconstruction dating to 1921. The columns on the front of the church were painted red, the capitals yellow with black markings.You may be surprised to find Egyptian architecture in southern Arizona, but these capitals are Egyptian in style, introduced into Spain by the Moors and copied here by the person who designed the facade. Many architectural features of the church reflect cultures that the Spanish had come in contact with over time. The statue niches, a Roman introduction, were painted blue. The pointed arches of the two niches beside the window are Moorish in style. The little corbels, or shelves, at the base of the niches brought the statues forward so they might be seen from a wider angle. The tower was built in three stories - the baptistery on the ground floor, the robing room on the next level, and the bell arches on top. You can still see the holes where scaffolding was built into the walls during construction - round holes in the lower part of the tower, and square holes in the brick of the bell arch piers. Although the bell tower arches appear to be in a state of ruin, they are in almost exactly the same condition as they were when the church was abandoned, never having been completed. Note the scallop shell motif of the statue niches. Scallop shells are associated with the patron saint of Spain, Saint James, and with Christian pilgrimage in the middle Ages, pilgrims travelling to Santiago de Composteta on the Atlantic coast of Spain would often bring back a scallop shell as a symbolic momento of that journey. Although the bells you see are not original to Tumacacori, it was the pealing of similar bells that kept the mission community on schedule.l This picture was taken on 12 November 2017, Sig...