Átil

Átil is the seat of one of the smallest municipalities in Sonora: the village had 612 people in 2020 and lies about 560 meters up in the basin of the Altar river, which here only runs in the rainy season. The name is Piman for arrowhead. Fields are watered from the Cuauhtémoc reservoir in the north of the municipality, and people live from farming and cattle.

Jesuit records call the mission Los Siete Príncipes del Átil, the Seven Archangels. There is no evidence of a church in Kino's day; a 1730 report says one was only just being started. The church and priest's house went up under Father Jacobo Sedelmayr of Tubutama, while Átil was his outstation, and in March 1747 he wrote that he had brought some 200 O'odham from the coast, who settled and were baptized here. From 1756 to 1761 the Jesuit Ignaz Pfefferkorn was based in Átil; he later wrote a well-known account of the province of Sonora. When the Franciscans took over in 1768 the patron became Saint Francis of Assisi and Átil became a mission seat, with Oquitoa as its outstation. It had 137 souls in 1772 and two resident friars in 1797, when the church was described as two rooms, nave and sacristy, with adobe walls and floor and a beamed roof.

Those adobe walls still stand in part, slowly melting next to the church in use today. Near the village are also the ruins of Santa Teresa, a ranch Kino founded in 1701. Through the 19th century Átil belonged to the Altar district; it became a municipality late in that century, was abolished in 1930 and restored on December 24, 1934.