Patagonia -- The white stucco mission on McKeown Avenue, separated from the state highway by the tree-lined park, looks like a lovingly restored remnant of this quiet town's Spanish Colonial past. Until it occurs to you that this 1880s mining and railroad hub has no Spanish Colonial past. And you remember there used to be a rowdy roadhouse bar in this spot. And the massive wooden doors of La Misión de San Miguel open to release a blast of rock 'n' roll.

Welcome to Cecilia San Miguel's latest bit of inspired madness -- 5,000 square feet of smoke-free nightclub for a town with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants.

No churches were desecrated in the making of this nightclub. The building that sat here for 90 years had been the Big Steer bar for much of its life before San Miguel bought it a little more than a year ago, gutted it and rebuilt it in the inimitable style that already permeates her other Patagonia project -- the Velvet Elvis restaurant.

The anomalies never cease. Here is a mission that contains a bar; a bar that incorporates sacred imagery in its many murals and decorations; a place built for dancing and drinking, where smoking is banned and moderation is encouraged. It could have been a lot weirder than this.

The rumors were rife during the year of reconstruction. When San Miguel assured one of her restaurant customers that she'd look into installing an oxygen bar for the benefit of the alcohol-free, "live food" eaters at the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center, the town buzzed with that news. When she planned a Spanish-style menu of light bar food -- tapas -- word got out she was opening a topless bar.

That's life in a small town. Everybody knows everybody else's business, however imperfectly.

And everyone in town has an opinion about San Miguel and her new enterprise.

For some, La Misión de San Miguel symbolizes the dilemma facing Patagonia as its surrounding grasslands go from ranches to ranchettes and its economy turns from feed store to fine food, with heavy doses of eco-tourism and New Age spiritualism.

This little town, 75 miles south of Tucson, is one of a handful in Arizona that lost population in the decade between 1990 and 2000. Its estimated 900 current residents are wary of every little change, and the opening of La Misión is a big one.

"If someone blinks an eye, it impacts the town," said Mary Munroe, whose home borders the nightclub's back patio.

Munroe, 72, said she learned that lesson when an old mesquite, partly on her property and partly on the town's, began dying a few years back. "We had to have a town meeting about it," she said.

This latest change has required some adaptation. Munroe had her porch enclosed and heavily insulated to buffer her living quarters from the sound of live music on weekends.

She refuses to complain about it.

"I'm glad I did it. It's a nice porch," she said. "It's an absolutely incredible, beautiful building, an improvement. I don't have the old drunks peeing out back anymore."

Munroe, who ran a newspaper here for four years, enjoys watching the subtle changes in her adopted town. "Each person who moves in brings a new character, new thought, and the town turns minutely in that direction," she said.

When Cecilia San Miguel moved in, she brought a little more character than most new residents. She is a small woman with big ideas.

"I am bigger than life," she says. "I am 20 feet tall."

San Miguel, 53, moved here in 1997, shortly after the death of her husband. "I was starting a new book, not just a new chapter."

A native of Ecuador who moved to Chicago as a teenager, San Miguel had done a little modeling, a little hair and makeup design. She owned an art gallery in Oregon and worked as an immigration specialist for a law firm in San Diego.

She knew nothing about restaurants, so of course she opened one.

"Now I have a restaurant and now I am Miss Kitty of Patagonia with a bar, so you can see I'm all over the planet," she said.

And the planet inhabits her Misión. The tables and chairs came from India, the religious painting from Spain, the parota wood for the 30-foot-long bar from the Central American rain forests, the imagery in the murals from South America, the barn wood from down the road.

The place is huge, filling almost every inch of its 50-by-125-foot lot. The building is 14-feet high at its center peak. Its hand-troweled 6,000 square feet of ceiling is faux-painted in a rust to match the iron-stained cliffs of Red Mountain, Patagonia's signature peak.

She thought the place needed some horses, so Alix Mosieur, an artist friend from Oregon, created a 60-foot mural on the dance-floor wall -- the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

A brightly painted "sacred anaconda" snakes along the walls at ceiling height, its head emerging in another mural, a jungle scene painted by Lucia Cartes, an artist from nearby Elgin. It reflects, said San Miguel, "the Shamanic spirituality of the Indians of the Americas."

Cowboy kitsch is at a minimum. The front half of the space is divided into a small wine-tasting room by an adobe wall with a porch overhang crafted from the weathered wood and tin of the old Hale homestead on Harshaw Road. Huge steer horns, rescued from the Big Steer, hang over the interior entryways.

The floor here is adobe pavers from Mexico, and in the center of the room is a carved stone fountain. There is a painting of St. Michael, looking quite different from his usual St. Michael the Archangel image. Instead of shining silver breastplate and the curly light-colored hair of an angel, this Miguel is bare-chested and muscular, with the long dark hair and strong face of an Apache warrior.

"This is my Geronimo St. Michael," says San Miguel. On the opposite wall is a portrait of a woman, depicted in an Eden-like setting with her back to you, nude with a face that is half jaguar and half unmistakably Cecilia San Miguel. "The artist has added some curves," she says in a rare, self-effacing moment.

La Mision is a bold statement in this tiny town of tree-lined streets, where crumbling adobes, aging trailers and newer double-wides sit beside neat little bungalows or Victorian-style mini-mansions.

"I think it's a reflection of a person's vision. I don't know if it's more than that. I support her. We're a town filled with people who do whatever the heck they want," said Adrienne M. Halpert, who owns Global Arts Gallery and is president of the Patagonia Area Business Association. Halpert, former manager of the Congress Hotel in Tucson, said Patagonia is a good place to do business.

"Baked urbanites are my market," she said. "It's a great place to come down and be where there's water and green and mountains and trailers and art and food and opinions. It's a hour away from Tucson and it's a gorgeous drive."

Her business has grown steadily in the nine years it's been open, she said.

According to the State Department of Commerce, population and assessed valuation both shrank in Patagonia during the 90s but taxable sales skyrocketed from $2.4 million in 1990 to $8.4 million in 2001.

Tourism is rising in Patagonia. The big attraction is the area's scenery, especially the Nature Conservancy's Patagonia-Sonoita Creek preserve, which attracts about 5,000 visitors, mostly birders, yearly, according to preserve manager Carol Lambert.

But birders are early risers, not night owls. Folks here wonder how San Miguel will attract enough customers to earn back the huge investment she's made.

"Time will tell," said Kent Haugaard, who with his wife Jenna owns the Gathering Grounds cafe and sandwich shop. "I think it's a bit ambitious myself, but I'm not gonna say it's a bad idea," he said.

Haugaard doesn't view the nightclub as competition for the Gathering Grounds, which has begun opening on Saturday nights, offering "a soapbox for all the local musicians and poets and the phenomenal people just passing through town."

On a recent Saturday night, as La Misión kicked off its rock offerings at 8 p.m., the Gathering grounds was entering its final hour of "open mic" night. Across the street at the Wagon Wheel bar, karaoke was about to begin. A lot of choices for a little town.

San Miguel knows she can't count on local traffic to fill her nightclub which, on this night, attracted about 100 people to dance, drink and eat shish kabobs from the mesquite grill out back.

"People say there is nothing like this as anywhere else. This is going to be a destination. We are going to have to market this place and Patagonia."

She knows it will be tough. "Patagonia is a very quiet town. People have chosen it because it is quiet. The doors close in Patagonia at 8 p.m. I was never able to keep the restaurant open past that; there is no business."

Lisa Sharp, a native of the region who will close her Patagonia area B&B, Tierra de los Sueños, this month, said if anybody can pull it off, San Miguel can. "Cecilia has built a pretty good reputation with the Velvet Elvis. Maybe people will come down based on that. She can certainly draw from Tubac and Sonoita. The place is just gorgeous, and it'd just rock if it were in Phoenix or Tucson."

Santa Cruz County Supervisor John Maynard said he saw folks from all over his district when he and his wife went to La Misión for a night of dancing.

"It's a regional attraction," he said. "Residents from around the county will drive out for an evening of meals and dancing. I saw people there from Rio Rico, Tubac and Sonoita. It's a beautiful piece of restoration and architecture," he said.

And while Patagonia's population might be stagnant, the surrounding area is growing rapidly, said Maynard, especially Rio Rico, north of Nogales, which accounted for 80 percent of the county's 700 building permits lat year.

San Miguel, who mortgaged her house and borrowed more money from friends to finish the restoration, said she built the place with her heart -- not her head -- after the owner of the building was unable to sell it at auction.