Fiesta de Santiago y Santa Ana (San Luis)

After Mass on the Sunday of the Fiesta de Santiago y Santa Ana, the yard of Sangre de Cristo Church in San Luis fills with food booths. Each is kept by one mission church or society of the parish. At the 2026 fiesta, on Sunday, July 26:

• The Knights of Columbus cooked hamburgers and bratwurst with chips.
• The San Luis mission sold fresh fruit cups.
• Blanca and Fort Garland brought menudo and posole.
• San Francisco and San Isidro, with Juan and Lucille Maestas as their contacts, made stuffed sopaipillas.
• Chama served pulled pork and coleslaw.
• San Pedro served tacos and Spanish rice.
• San Acacio and Garcia served chicken and potato salad.
• The Carmelitas, the Sagrado Corazón, and the Morada offered biscochitos and pastelitos.
• The Atencio family poured water and soda.

The parish supplied the plates, bowls, and utensils. Each mission bought its own food and supplied its own workers and cashiers, and the proceeds went to the parish and its projects. The thanks went out from Father Emmanuel and the Santa Ana Planning Committee.

The church yard is one corner of a weekend the Town of San Luis runs from Main Street. The 2026 fiesta ran July 23 through 26, was free, and marked the town’s 175th anniversary. The town billed it as “San Luis’ Oldest Festival in Colorado’s Oldest Town.” The schedule listed bands, vendors and food trucks, parades, a rubber duck race, a car show, a softball tournament, a 10k run, museum exhibitions, and a mariachi Mass. The town’s listing says that “every year, people from around the Southwest gather in our small town to remember our history and celebrate our culture.” San Luis has about 750 residents, by the town’s count, and its adobe buildings and Spanish town plan date from the early settlement of southern Colorado.

Mariachis, fireworks, and a run up the mesa

The Valley Courier’s account of the 2025 fiesta, July 25 to 27, shows how such a weekend runs. It opened Friday with a 5 p.m. Mass at the Immaculate Conception Church in Chama, followed by live music in San Luis at 8. The parade went down Main Street at 10 Saturday morning. In San Luis Community Park that evening, No Chaser played from 4 to 6, Dewayne Ortega from 6 to 8, and Gonzalo from 8 until midnight, with fireworks at 11. The music in the park was free.

Sunday began at 7 a.m. with the Stations of the Cross 10K. The race listing describes a route through town, out along country roads, through the historic Vega, past the oldest public ditch, and up the path of the Shrine of the Stations of the Cross. The shrine stands on the mesa above town. Its life-size bronzes of the stations were made by local sculptor Huberto Maestas, and a fifteenth figure shows the resurrection. The stations lead up to All Saints’ Chapel, with a grotto to Our Lady of Guadalupe beyond. The shrine was developed in the 1990s, and the Pueblo Chieftain named the Rev. Pat Valdez, then pastor of Sangre de Cristo Parish, as its visionary.

A second parade followed downtown at 10. At 11, Mariachi San Luis sang Mass in the Sangre de Cristo Church courtyard and stayed on to perform. Joseph Quintana, of the group, told the Courier it is a six-piece ensemble: two trumpets, plus one player each on violin, guitar, guitarrón, and vihuela. By his account the group formed about 28 years ago, mostly with musicians from San Luis and a few from Alamosa. Its members attend several mariachi conferences a year, and it has helped train more than 150 local students, several of whom became professional musicians. At noon Spanish colonial dancers took the same courtyard. The weekend also brought a lowrider car show.

The Santa Ana queen

The fiesta has a queen, chosen by the parish’s Santa Ana Pageant Committee. In 2026 the pageant was held Thursday evening, July 23. Each contestant’s 250-word essay was read aloud, and the young women gave talent and evening-gown presentations. The crowning followed Friday evening, July 24, during Mass. Through the weekend the queen and her court appear at parades, Masses, dances, barbecues, and Main Street events. Afterward she represents the parish for the year, helps build the Santa Ana float, and receives an $800 scholarship.

In 1991 the pageant was held at 7:30 on Friday evening at the Carlos Beaubien Theater. Kimberly Sanchez, Maria Vigil, Bernadette Barela, Rhonda Medina, Angelica Jaquez, and Lisa Gallegos competed that year for the title of Santana queen.

Beaubien’s town and its two saints

San Luis was established on April 5, 1851. The Pueblo Chieftain credits its founding to Carlos Beaubien, who had inherited half of the Sangre de Cristo land grant. The Courier says the town was founded by settlers from the Taos Valley of New Mexico. The fiesta honors the town’s patron saints, Santiago and Santa Ana, and the town’s listing dates the tradition to the founding. The Courier gives it more than 170 years in San Luis and traces its roots to Seville, Spain, in 1266. Newspapers have given the name both ways: the Feast of St. James and St. Anne, or, in the Chieftain in 2001, Fiesta de Santana y Santiago. “Santana” is the local form of the name.

The parish that runs the religious side of the weekend came three decades after the town. Sangre de Cristo Parish received its first pastor, Father J.V. Montaño, in 1881. Father Samuel Garcia finished the church in San Luis in 1894, and his transepts turned its single nave into a cross.

When the town turned 150, on Thursday, April 5, 2001, it held a procession and Mass that day but saved the large celebration for July and the fiesta. A sesquicentennial committee had been planning it since the previous year’s Santana festival. Its members included Father Valdez, San Luis Museum curator Juanita Gurule, social worker Floyd Garcia, Theresa Maes, Glenda Maes, and Sally Chavez. In 2022 the town used the fiesta, then July 22 to 24, to unveil a pop-up town plaza, restored facades on its historic downtown, and parklets and installations made with local business owners. The installations stayed up until August 7.

Horse races and a carnival

The 1991 fiesta opened Thursday with a 5 p.m. Mass for St. James at Chama, with a procession before it and a potluck supper after. St. Anne had her Mass at 6 the next evening at Sangre de Cristo Church, followed by a procession to the grotto on the mesa. Parades ran at 10 on Saturday and Sunday mornings under the theme “Desert Peace,” in honor of returning military personnel. From noon to 5 there was continuous entertainment at the cultural center, with booths selling crafts and local foods. The carnival was set up on the American Legion grounds. Horse races ran at the rodeo grounds north of town at 2, and bingo began at 7 in the parish hall.

Rides were part of the fiesta by 1950. A photograph from that year, now in the Auraria Library’s digital collections, shows Cenaida Roybal Manzanares and her sister-in-law, Francisca Manzanares Quintana, standing near the rides at the fiesta.