Twenty-five miles north of Taos, in the center of the village of Questa, stands an adobe church that has been testing its community's devotion for nearly two centuries. San Antonio de Padua — Saint Anthony of Padua — anchors a parish whose roots reach back to the first years of the settlement the Spanish called San Antonio del Rio Colorado.
The settlement's founding was not easy. Francisco Laforet's first attempt in 1829 was thwarted by Indian attacks, forcing him to a defensive ridge in the foothills; the next wave of settlers arrived in 1835, only to be dispersed again. The community was officially founded in 1842, and by 1860 it had its church: that year Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy visited the area and reported a "beautiful new chapel on the north side of the Rio Colorado plaza" — an adobe church built of earth, faith, and the labor of the families who refused to leave.
Adobe is a demanding material. It breathes, it shifts, and when moisture works into its walls, it can fail catastrophically. In 2008, the west wall of San Antonio de Padua came down — one of the most dramatic church collapses in New Mexico in living memory, the kind of event that usually ends a historic building's story. The congregation was divided over whether the old church could or should be saved.
What happened next is the reason the church still stands. Volunteers from Questa and beyond — adoberos, masons, preservationists, and neighbors — gave years of labor to rebuild the church the traditional way, adobe brick by adobe brick, in a restoration effort that became one of the great community preservation stories of the Enchanted Circle. The feast of Saint Anthony, June 13, is still celebrated, and the church still holds its place at the heart of the village.
San Antonio de Padua is among the oldest parish communities in Taos County, and it is old in the way that matters: not as a museum piece, but as a working church, rebuilt by the same kind of stubborn communal labor that raised it in the first place. Questa would not let it fall — and so it stands, earth and faith, as it always has.
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