Pitiquito

Pitiquito is the seat of its municipality in northwestern Sonora, about 320 meters up and only 11 km from Caborca. Local tradition says the name comes from a native leader called Piti or Pitic. Father Eusebio Kino founded the mission in 1694 as Natividad del Señor de Pitiquin, and in Jesuit times it was an outstation of Caborca: an adobe chapel under construction in 1706 was gone by 1730, and in 1772 the place was reported to have neither church nor priest's house. Pitiquito became a municipality in 1914, during the Revolution.

The present brick-and-lime church of San Diego de Pitiquito was begun in the late 1770s by Fray José Matías Moreno, who was baptizing there by March 1776, and completed by Fray Pedro Font, chronicler of the Anza expedition, who died at Pitiquito in September 1781, weeks after Moreno was killed at Yuma. What makes it famous is on the walls. In 1966 a girl at Mass saw a skeleton appear on a column, along with the words MANE THECEL PHARES. The paintings had lain under whitewash for years, and the detergent used to clean the walls reacted with the lime and brought them back. Conservators later uncovered more: Lucifer, the Virgin Mary, symbols of the Passion, emblems of the evangelists and a pair of scales, 19th-century folk art, plus painted 18th-century frames with serpents and figures in headdresses that may be the work of an O'odham painter.

Summers are dry and fierce, with July highs averaging 40 °C, and winters mild. The San Diego fiestas fill the first two weeks of November, and there are horse races on most Sundays of the year.