El Camino Real
We have just finished our tour of fourteen of the California Missions, meaning that we have now visited all twenty-one full-fledged missions that were established by the Spaniards who pushed north from Mexico into Las Californias to explore and settle this wondrous land between 1683 and 1835. Las Californias consisted of three sections ranging from Cabo San Lucas at the southern tip of what we call Baja California up to Sonoma, north of SanFrancisco Bay. The southern portion of Las Californias consist of Baja California, from the 28th parallel to modern Tijuana and Baja California Sur from the 28th parallel down to the tip of the peninsula. The 600 mile span from San Diego to Sonoma was called Alta California. Whether a function of history or natural geography (or both), this stretch of coastline still forms the bulk of inhabited California, with very little to the north or east of the areas that the Spanish conquistadores staked out as theirs. The rest still hasn’t much of anything in it.
Alta California was explored and settled a full century after the Bajas, which is amazing when you realize how much more developed what they called Alta California is than Baja. Once again that may be driven by governance and support or it may be driven by the barren geography of the south versus the verdant and lush north. Between the 1769-1770 Portola Expeditions that established the Mission San Diego de Alcala and Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Rio Carmelo (but was stopped by the Golden Gate entrance to San Francisco Bay) and the De Anza Expedition of 1775-1776 that established the inland route that went up the East Bay as far as Sonoma, all of the Mission sites were either established or identified. There are thus really two Camino Reals running up California. One tends to closely follow what is now Rt. 1 along the coast and is generally attributed to Father Junipero Sera (even though he went from San Diego to Carmel by ship, leaving the land to Portola). The other and more accepted version of the Camino Real and memorializing the expeditions of Juan Bautista de Anza, more or less follows Rt. 101 up the inland valleys to the East Bay.
The state of California Historical Society has demarcated El Camino Real running along Rt. 101 with brass bells every mile or so. It makes for a pleasant reminder for those on a mission quest as we were. The location of the twenty-one missions seems more random than not until one grasps the nature of the two expeditions which established them. It is also interesting to note the founding dates of all the missions since they do not follow a logical progression up the state, but rather the locations set by the two expeditions and the way in which they decided to “fill-in” behind themselves with missions that would leave about a day’s hard ride (30 miles or so) between missions. This is reminiscent of the Caravanserai system along the Silk Road in Asia Minor and is logical as a way to traverse the newly settled area. The gradual spread of settlement combined with the secularization of the times saw the missions go from the main settlement centers to lying in disrepair, only to get taken over once again by the Church and gradually revived, especially during the Mission Renovation Movement a century ago.
Most of the missions have undergone some degree of renovation but having now seen them all, it’s fair to say they fall into three broad categories of renovation; urban, suburban and rural. The urban ones are almost indistinguishable from modern churches and are generally in perfect repair and often in use as parish churches and schools. Those include Dolores (in S.F.), San Diego, Buenaventura, San Rafael, San Gabriel, Santa Barbara and Santa Clara (which actually sits in the middle of the private university of the same name). The suburban missions have some features of their urban cousins and yet are not as well preserved or maintained. They include San Luis Rey, Capistrano, San Fernando Rey, San Luis Obispo, San Carlos Borromeo de Rio Carmel, Santa Cruz, San Jose and Solana (the last mission established in 1823 in Sonoma). My favorite missions are the rural ones that are more authentic and thus more evocative of what these settlement centers were actually like two centuries ago when they were in their heyday. They are, in the order I favor, La Purisima Concepcion in Lompoc, San Miguel Arcangel, San Juan Bautista, San Antonio de Padua, Nuestra Senora de Soledad and Santa Ines in Solvang. These rural missions are more or less grouped from Santa Barbara to just south of San Jose. It stands to reason that they remained more authentic and rural since the whole area is rural. If you want to do a mini-mission quest, go to Santa Barbara and do Santa Ines and La Purisima in that order and you will feel as though you are going back in time. By the time you get out in the field with the pigs and sheep at La Purisima, you will feel like you rode there on horseback and can expect a bowl of thin bean soup for dinner.
El Camino Real, the King’s Road was used as a term when the crown of Spain kept control over Mexico. They lost control of it in 1821, two years before the good Franciscan fathers established their last mission in Sonoma. I think it is fair to assume that the Church as embodied in the Franciscan monks in California probably felt that Spain or Mexico made no difference to their permanence in running the missions through Alta California. Such is the arrogance historically of the Church as it barreled forward choosing to separate church and state when it was convenient and tucking in closely to the state when it served their purpose. A dozen years after independence, Mexico realized that the Church was much tighter with the crown than with them and they went about a process of general securitization. By 1836 they had broken up and exiled the Franciscans and confiscated their lands. It was intended that the land would get redistributed to the indigenous people of the area as compensation for the hardship that the Franciscans had inflicted on the Indians for so many years.
Naturally that plan didn’t work out exactly as it was intended and the process of securitization tended to mostly involve the distribution of mission assets and lands to the most powerful local families that were most loyal and helpful to their Mexican patrons. Remember, this territory of Alta California (probably still thought by some to be a big island, as early Spanish explorers claimed) was even less valuable to Mexico than the colonies were to the British. It was rugged and wild and as yet had no meaningful gold finds. I imagine someone in Mexico got his ass kicked in 1848 when the strike at Sutter’s Mill made California the goldbug destination of choice. By then, El Camino Real was just another not-so-regal dusty dirt road connecting a bunch of broken down churches.