Misión San Juan Capistrano

The Misión San Juan Capistrano was a Spanish colonial complex intended to evangelize the native peoples. Although Spain claimed vast stretches of territory throughout the Americas, it struggled to produce enough bureaucrats to staff local governments. In some sparsely-populated regions like the modern-day US Southwest, the Crown granted missionaries the power to establish and supervise settlements among the indigenous people in order to convert them to Christianity. Francsiscan friars oversaw the San Juan Mission, which was built with indigneous labor in the mid-eighteenth century near modern-day San Antonio, Texas. It originally featured a church, a convent, and a granary.