Home on the Rancho.

• Author: Stockdill, Ann

ON THE CALIFORNIA plains of North America, Luis Bonilla, native of Zacatecas, Mexico, is a visionary who enjoys sharing his building expertise with visitors to his ranch in New Cuyama.

Having absorbed the art and architecture of his boyhood home before emigrating to Riverside County as a young man, Bonilla progressed from working for wages to owning a small butcher shop, which he later expanded to include other shops and tortilla factories. He now owns a group of family-operated stores that help finance his current project, Rancho Bonilla, a replica of a Mexican village. It is crafted to reflect Spanish colonial, western Islamic, and baroque architectures, still visible today in buildings from Spain's Alhambra to Zacatecas's Municipal Palace and the Church of Santo Domingo.

"The Mexican village I have built in southern California is not Mission style," explains Bonilla. "Many North Americans are under the impression that Mission style represents all architecture of Mexico and Spain, and this simply is not true, as my village demonstrates."

Constructed on a seven-hundred-acre tract, which also doubles as a working ranch for row crops and Andalusian horse breeding, Bonilla's project is nothing short of miraculous. In the last fifteen years, serving as architect, designer, engineer, and patron to his personally selected work crew from Mexico, Bonilla has completed a town square with bandstand and park; a bull-ring type amphitheater for horse shows; a gazebo; and a lakesized fountain-splashed lagoon, which also serves as a reservoir for crops of carrots, alfalfa, and beans. The grounds are punctuated by cobblestones, rose gardens, wrought-iron street lamps, and more than five hundred trees...