Links
SantaBarbara.com / the mission
The difficult years were over and the
"Golden Age" of the California Missions was dawning. Launched as it was
at the beginning of such prosperous times, Santa Barbara had the
greatest of good fortune during all its early years. True, an early
church was destroyed in the earthquake of 1812, but a new and more
impressive edifice was already needed.
Santa
Barbara's mission church, with its world-famous twin bell towers, boasts
of a stone facade patterned after an ancient Latin temple in
pre-Christian Rome. The design is traced to a book brought to California
by the Franciscans, a Spanish reprint of an architecture book originally
published in 27 B.C. This beautiful new church stood firm for over a
hundred years until suffering severe damage in an earthquake in 1925.
Two years of rebuilding plus later restoration work has maintained the
exact original appearance.
