IN 1769 Saint Junipero Serra established the Mission San Fernando de Velicatá, Lower California. He arrived at San Diego on 1 July, and on 16 July founded the first of the twenty-one California missions.

MAPS

TYPICAL MISSION

SAN DIEGO

FOUNDED in 1769, the mission met with fierce resistance from the indigenous people from the beginning, culminating in a Indian revolt in 1774.  The present adobe church was dedicated in 1813 and occupied by the army after secularization.  Only the crumbling facade remained at the time of the restoration in 1931.  The famous bell tower was reconstructed based on the 1853 color lithograph

SAN CARLOS BOROMEO de CARMELO

THE second California mission founded by St. Serra served as the headquarters for the missions under St. Serra and his successors, Fr.s Palóu and Lasuén.  The buildings fell into ruins after secularization: mass was celebrated in the sacristy which had not completely collapsed. Restoration began in 1882. The church houses the tombs of Serra, Crespi, and Lasuén.

DESIGNED by architect Manuel Ruiz, the same architect who designed the mission church, the Presidio chapel was built of the same stone and completed in the same year as Carmel Mission.  It was originally served by Franciscans from the mission and has been in continuous use since 1794..  Particularly noteworthy is the carving of the Virgin of Guadalupe, considered by many art historians to be the first non-native carving in California.

SAN ANTONIO

SAN GABRIEL

ON October 25, 1785, the warrior population of six rancherias (the exact number of attackers is unknown) descended on Mission San Gabriel, with a woman shaman of nearby Japchivit rancheria in the lead as some native victress, a Tongva Joan of Arc, who had “encouraged them to be brave and fight.” It was Toypurina. As a girl, she had probably witnessed her chief’s head hanging on a pike for his challenge to a soldier guilty of raping the chief’s wife. Toypurina had waited fourteen years for revenge. She had joined forces with San Gabriel’s native alcalde (i.e. mission overseer), Nicolas José, a complex and conflicted man, who had procured women for Spanish soldiers and also lost two wives and a son to the mysterious pox.

The San Gabriel missionaries had been tipped off to the rebellion, and no sooner had the war party arrived than they were surrounded by the Spanish guard; those who did not escape were arrested. Twenty-five Tongva were lashed up to twenty-five times and released. Four, including Nicolas José and Toypurina, stood trial.

When asked during the legal proceedings, “Have they [the Tongva] been harmed in any way at the hands of the soldiers, priests, or other Christians which would make them want to kill them?” Toypurina responded,

 “the only harm she had experienced was that we [the Spaniards] were living on their land.”

There is no more succinct expression of Indian motive to revolt in California, or anywhere else on the continent.

Imprisoned “as much for her own protection as punishment” (some rebels blamed her for inciting them to a battle lost before it started), Toypurina was impregnated in prison. She ended up marrying a Spanish soldier—Manuel Montero—turning Christian (taking the name Regina Josefa), and raising three children at Carmel before her death in 1799 at Mission San Juan Bautista. (In 1821, one of her daughters, Clementina, was accused by a priest at Mission Santa Cruz—himself accused of “immoral conduct” — of having “mother’s milk like snake venom.”) [Adapted from Gregory Orfalea, Journey to the Sun, Junipero Serra’s Dream and the Founding of California (Scribner, 2014)]

SAN LUIS OBISPO

SAN FRANCISCO de ASIS

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO

SANTA CLARA

 SAN BUENAVENTURA

Lasuen

 SANTA BARBARA

 LA PURISIMA

THE most fully restored and furnished of the 21 California Missions, La Purisima, is also a California State Park, and one of two missions not controlled by the Catholic Church: the other is Santa Cruz.

 S

SANTA CRUZ

WHEN called upon, most famously, in 1818 to defend the mission from the Argentine pirate Hippolyte de Bouchard, citizens of the neighboring town of Branciforte sacked the mission instead. [...] The Branciforteans also lured the natives away from the mission with cash and gambling, helping Mission Santa Cruz earn the dubious distinction of being the least populated (i.e., successful) mission in California.

In a state of decline, the mission was secularized in 1834, meaning its property was distributed to civilians, and would later meet its demise from earthquake damage. All that remains of the original mission is a dormitory patio. This portion of the original mission is a State Park, and not under control of the Church. 

A SHORT distance from the original surviving mission porchway is a replica of the mission church  and a Catholic parish church. The chapel and reliquary on Emmett Street, half a block from Santa Cruz Mission SHP, are reduced scale (half-size) representations of the original mission and house several original paintings. The gothic-style  Holy Cross Church at the head of Mission Plaza and on the site of the original mission church was constructed in 1889.

SOLEDAD

 SAN JOSE

 SAN JUAN BAUTISTA

 SAN MIGUEL ARCÂNGEL

 SAN FERNANDO REY

 SAN LOUIS REY

Those established by Father Serra or during his administration were

San Diego de Alcala

San Carlos (3 June, 1770)

San Antonio (14 July, 1771)

San Gabriel (8 September, 1771)

San Luis Obispo (1 September, 1772)

San Francisco de Asis (8 October, 1776)

San Juan Capistrano (1 Nov. 1776)

Santa Clara (12 January, 1777)

San Buenaventura (31 March, 1782)

Under Sera's successor Lasuen

Santa Barbara (Dec. 4, 1786; rebuilt 1812-1840; restored p/ earthquake 1925)

San Fernando Rey (Sept. 8, 1797)

La Purisima (Dec 8, 1787)

Santa Cruz  (August 28, 1791)

Soledad (October 9, 1791)

San José (June 11, 1797)

San Juan Bautista (June 24, 1797)

San Miguel Arcângel (June 25, 1797)

San Fernando Rey (September 8,1797)

San Louis Rey (June 13, 1798)

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