Holy City of the Wichitas

The Holy City grew out of an Easter pageant first staged in the Wichita Mountains in the 1920s. As the event drew larger crowds, organizers set about building permanent stone structures to serve as its backdrop, using the pink granite that lies all around in these hills. During the Great Depression, workers with federal relief programs helped raise many of the buildings.

The result is a remarkable ensemble: chapels, gates, walls, and buildings meant to echo ancient Jerusalem, arranged among the boulders so that the natural rock and the built stone blend into one another. The rounded granite hills of the Wichitas stand in convincingly for the stony landscape of the Holy Land, giving the site a genuine sense of place.

The heart of the Holy City is its Easter sunrise passion play, which dramatizes the final days of the life of Jesus and has been performed here for generations. It is one of the oldest continuously running passion plays in the country, drawing large crowds who gather among the stone buildings and boulders in the pre-dawn dark.

Volunteers from the region take the roles, and the natural amphitheater of the mountains provides the stage. For many families across southwest Oklahoma, attending the play is a long tradition, and it remains the event that defines the site, though the grounds welcome visitors of all backgrounds the rest of the year.

The Holy City lies within the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, a landscape of ancient granite peaks, boulder fields, oak groves, and prairie that is one of the natural jewels of the southern plains. The mountains are far older than the Rockies, worn down over hundreds of millions of years into the rounded, rocky hills seen today.

Because the site sits inside the refuge, a drive to the Holy City comes with the chance of seeing free-ranging bison, elk, and Texas longhorn cattle along the roads, along with the sweeping mountain scenery. The combination of the stone village and the wild refuge around it makes for a memorable and unusual outing.

The Wichita Mountains take their name from the Wichita people, one of the tribes long associated with this region of the southern plains, and the wider area is tied to the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache nations who lived and traveled across southwest Oklahoma. These are living nations whose histories are woven through the land around Lawton and Fort Sill.

Against that deep backdrop, the Holy City is a twentieth-century addition, a distinctive piece of regional culture set within an ancient landscape. Travelers who come for the stone Jerusalem often stay for the mountains, the wildlife, and the long views that make this corner of Oklahoma so unexpectedly grand.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.