San Juan Bautista and La Garita

You are in La Garita, one of the oldest Hispano settlements in Colorado. Families pushing north from New Mexico founded this place in the nineteenth century, naming it for the nearby La Garita Mountains, and they began raising cattle, sheep, and crops in the high valley. At the heart of the community stands the Capilla de San Juan Bautista, the Chapel of Saint John the Baptist.

An earlier church here was lost to fire. The adobe chapel you see was rebuilt on the same ground in the years that followed. This area is also said to have held a morada, a place of worship of the Penitente brotherhood, a living thread of Spanish Catholic tradition carried north into Colorado.