In 1749, the Spanish Franciscan padre Junipero Serra (1713-1784), who had been born in the small village Petra in the northeast of Majorca and there had been trained for being a padre, went on a missionary expedition to the New World together with some fellow brethren. He went by ship from Cádiz to Veracruz, today’s Mexico. There he founded a number of missions, learned the language of the Native Americans and taught them – in a today highly controversial way – how to make vast tracts of land arable and how to work them. The pictures show his place of birth Petra, where a museum was built in his honour and other memorials were erected in a more or less artistic way.

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