Mexicans delight in telling visitors how much bigger and better is the series of canyons collectively known as the Copper Canyon than the Grand Canyon, in Arizona. And it is true that these dramatic gorges are immense and impressive. Of the six major canyons composing Las Barrancas del Cobre system, four are deeper than the Grand Canyon. In additions to their natural beauty, they are dotted with Jesuit missions, abandoned mines, early twentieth century mansions, and indigenous cave dwellings.

Missionaries and miners were the fist non-Indians to settle in the pine-scented mountains and deep, scrubby gorges of the Sierra Tarahumara, part of the Sierra Madre Occidental west of Chihuahua. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Jesuits established simple but beautiful churches throughout this canyon country.