Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi

Romanesque cathedral built over an older adobe parish

A French-Romanesque cathedral built between 1869 and 1886 at the order of Archbishop Lamy — the formidable French cleric who tried to bring European Catholicism to nineteenth-century New Mexico, a story Willa Cather fictionalised in Death Comes for the Archbishop. The cathedral's golden sandstone is a strikingly un-Southwestern presence in adobe Santa Fe.

The interior is bright with stained glass. The small Conquistadora Chapel on the north side preserves the older adobe building and one of the oldest sacred objects in North America. Free entry; mass is held in English and Spanish.

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A story
Set into the cathedral is a small adobe chapel that survives from the seventeenth-century parish church it replaced. Inside that chapel is La Conquistadora, the oldest Madonna statue in North America — brought to New Mexico in 1625 and now the city's patron.