Customer Reviews

Las Misiones Antiguas: The Spanish Missions of Baja California

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A beautiful 300-page book on the missions of Baja California. Scores of color photographs make it delight to peruse. The historical anecdotes, and the great maps and plans, and older black-and-white pictures enhance the reading experience and help convey how the missions grew, flourished, and in some cases returned to the rocks and soil from which they came. This is such a detailed and impressive labor of love and such a sincere work of scholarship, I have no trouble forgiving the author his few typos or locational inaccuracies. The book will long grace my coffee table and delight and inspire my Baja aficionado friends. I have visited many of these Baja missions and look forward now to visiting the rest

I would truly like to honor the authors effort by giving this book five stars, but can unfortunately not do so, due to inaccuracies that I find significant.
This book is written by a dedicated author and obviously designed for anyone who would like to visit the remains of the Baja Missions. In order to do so Mr. Vernon provides GPS data, which would be great if they would be accurate.
I have not yet visited any of the described sites, but noticed during the lecture of the book that some GPS data are far from where the Missions are placed on the books map. Mission San Francisco de Borja for example is according to the coordinates in the book located on the Mexican mainland and not on the Baja Peninsula. Visita de la Presentacion, too is marked on the books map far from the given longitude and latitude. This of course makes me wonder how many other coordinates are faulty. Minor errors may be undetectable on the map, but can be quite aggravating on site I suppose.
Still I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the Missions of Baja California. Just don't rely on it when you want to go there.

A very good guide to the missions of Baja. Have had very little problem finding the missions from the coordinates given in the book. Excellent photography.

In this tour de force, Vernon takes you on an adventure of lonely treks through the still-remote, isolated and wild interior of Baja California searching for Jesuit mission ruins from the long-gone Spanish colonial era. His haunting photography is exquisite, his narrative concise and pithy. He describes visually and verbally how these priests brought God to threatening stone-age men, good intentions often met with disasters. This extraordinary book inserts you into a little-known slice of history so you feel part of it. A grand accomplishment. Get it.

This is a must read for anyone interested in the history of Baja California Sur, giving you a window onto what life was like for the indians and missionaries in those wild deserts and mountains long before the age of the resorts.