Mission La Purísima
— the long colonnade the late sun walks through.
Not only on a wall.
“The eleventh of California's twenty-one Spanish missions, the only one laid out in a long single line instead of a quadrangle. The 1812 earthquake took the first site; the padres rebuilt here, a few miles northeast, on a slope above the Santa Ynez River. Most of what stands now was raised from rubble by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, adobe by adobe. The colonnade catches the afternoon light end to end. Sheep still graze the field below the long building. Nobody hurries through it.
Mission La Purísima, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Mission La Purísima Concepción sits four miles northeast of Lompoc, on a slope above the Santa Ynez River in Santa Barbara County, California. It was the eleventh of twenty-one Spanish missions founded along Alta California, established on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in December 1787 by Padre Fermín Francisco de Lasuén. The original mission, southwest of the present site, was destroyed by the December 1812 earthquake; reconstruction began the following year on this protected mesa above the river. The grounds are now La Purisima Mission State Historic Park, covering roughly 2,000 acres of coastal grassland, oak savanna, and chaparral between the Burton Mesa Ecological Reserve and Highway 246.
The mission was built from adobe: sun-dried mud and straw bricks laid in courses up to four feet thick, on stone foundations quarried locally. After the Mexican secularization of 1834 the buildings fell to ruin, and by the early twentieth century only fragments of wall remained above the grass. Between 1934 and 1941 the Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Park Service rebuilt the mission from the rubble outward, hand-making roughly 110,000 adobe bricks on site, milling clay tiles for the roofs, and reconstructing the colonnade arch by arch. It is now considered the most fully restored of California's twenty-one mission complexes.
La Purisima Mission State Historic Park sits at 2295 Purisima Road, four miles east of central Lompoc and about a fifty-minute drive north of Santa Barbara. The park is open daily, with a day-use vehicle fee charged at the entrance. Most of the original mission complex has been reconstructed on its original footprints: the long building with its colonnade, the church, the workshops, and the lavandería and aqueduct that fed the gardens. Living-history events, held periodically and at the annual Mission Fiesta, fill the grounds with volunteers in period dress, working looms, and a blacksmith forge. The orchards still bear fruit each summer.