Figure 6. East Morada. Size: 28.82 meters long, 4.88 wide, 3.58 high. Date: 19th century. Location: 300 meters east-southeast of Santo Tomás Church in main plaza; seen from northeast corner. Manufacture: Adobe bricks set on stone foundation; wood drains (canales) and beam (viga) ends at top of wall.
Figure 7. West end of south morada, showing construction of bell tower and contracted sanctuary walls.
Figure 8. Northwest view of east morada, showing limestone slab bell tower on contracted west end.
Plans of churches built close to Abiquiú in time, distance, and orientation could have served as sources for the design of the moradas' west ends (Figure 9). Only five kilometers east of Abiquiú stood the chapel dedicated to Santa Rosa de Lima. As shown in Figure 9f, the sanctuary in its west end had a raised floor and flanking entry pilasters, features found in the east morada's west end. This chapel was dedicated about 1744 and was still active as a visíta from Abiquiú in 1830.[49] Through this period and to the present, the popularity of Saint Rose of Lima has persisted at Abiquiú. Her nearby chapel would have been a likely and logical choice for the design of the morada's sanctuary end.
Figure 9. Plans of two Abiquiú moradas compared to New Mexican churches with contracted sanctuaries: A, south morada, B, east morada; C, Zía Mission; D, San Miguel in Santa Fe; E, Santa Cruz; F, Santa Rosa; G, Ranchos de Taos; H, the santuario at Chimayo; I, Córdova. (From Kubler, Religious Architecture [see ftn. 45]: C=his figure 8; D=28, E=9, F=34, G=13, H=22, I=35.)
A second possible source for the contracted ends of the Abiquiú moradas would be the south transept chapel of the Third Order of St. Francis at Santa Cruz (Figure 9e). It was completed shortly before 1798[50] and served Franciscan tertiaries into the 1830s. Plans compared in Figure 9 indicate that the dimensions of this left transept chapel at Santa Cruz measure only five percent larger than the chapel room of the east morada at Abiquiú, and the plans also reveal contracted chancel walls at both locations.
The concept of a constricted sanctuary as seen in Abiquiú moradas originated in earlier Spanish and Mexican churches. In 1479, architect Juan Guas used a trapezoidal apse plan in San Juan de los Reyes at Toledo and, by 1512, the design found its way into America's first cathedral at Santo Domingo. Within the first century of Spanish colonization, contracted sanctuary walls appeared on the American mainland in Arciniega's revised plan for Mexico City's Cathedral (post-1584)[51] and, again, in New Mexico, where it first appeared at the stone mission of Zía, built about 1614 (Figure 9c). Once established in the Franciscan province, the concept of converging sanctuary walls survived the 1680 Indian revolt and returned with the reconquest of New Mexico in 1693. Spaniards raised and rebuilt missions from the capital at Santa Fe (San Miguel, rebuilt 1710; Figure 9d) north to Taos (San Geronimo, 1706). Throughout the 18th century, in a three-to-one ratio, the churches of New Mexico used the contracted, as opposed to the box, sanctuary.