Tumacácori Church - Bell Tower

The bell tower was left unfinished with one corner still lacking its final bricks.

NPS Photo

The bell tower was built in three stories: on the ground floor lies the baptistry, on the second level the preparation room for the choir, and on the third level the arches and bells. The scallop shell niches harken to Saint James, Santiago de Compostela, the patron saint of Spain, and indicate a baptistry below. 

A bell hung under each of the four arches. With imagination, you can see young O’odham boys and girls standing on the ground below, pulling on ropes dangling from the tower, signaling for Mass to begin. Forty-niners, en route to the California gold rush, recalled the haunting sound of the bells ringing through the river valley as they approached. The whereabouts of those original bells remains a mystery. They have since been replaced. 

The bells rang many times each day, instructing mission residents when to eat, work, and pray. Yet the tower was never completed; round holes mark where construction scaffolding still supported the work in progress. Although the bell tower appears to be in ruin, it has changed little since the last residents left in 1848. The fired bricks of the bell arches never received their finishing coats of plaster. And whether a dome was intended to sit atop the tower we may never know.

Duration:

1 minute, 46 seconds

Tantalizingly inaccessible and spooky, a stairway leads from the baptistry to the choir loft and bell tower. Climb the steps virtually and risk neither a fall nor damage to the delicate original structure.