This is my 5th Top Comments diary on the topic of my vacation in early June, a road trip around parts of California with my hubby, mother-in-law, and her little black dog. Rather than continue to describe the trip in a linear fashion, I thought I could cover in a single diary visits to three California missions made on three separate days of the trip. The three missions were in Sonoma (Mission San Francisco Solano), Carmel (Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo), and San Luis Obispo (Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa). We also discussed visiting the mission in Santa Barbara, but that idea got nixed by the time we got to Santa Barbara.
The last two of these missions are still owned and controlled by the Roman Catholic Church and are places of worship. The first one on the list (and the first one we visited), in Sonoma, has been secularized and is now a California state park. For photos and details, please come below the fold.
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First, a little background: There is a string of 21 missions in California, running south to north, established by the Franciscan order of priests, under the leadership of Junipero Serra. The ostensible purpose these missions was to convert the Native Americans in the vicinity to Catholicism, and essentially try to turn them into Europeans. Much death, misery and cultural damage resulted from this process.
However, there was another purpose to the missions, a geopolitical one. The Spanish (before Mexican independence in 1822) and Mexicans (after 1822) wanted to establish control of the vast territory of Alta California before any other colonists could get there. And there was competition. The British had claimed land in northern California, though they had never occupied it; the Russians actually established a colony, for the purposes of the fur trade, in Fort Ross, near Bodega Bay, in 1812, complete with a (still standing) Russian Orthodox Church. (They gave up and abandoned their colony in 1842.) The northern-most missions established by the Spanish/Mexicans were intended to counter those other foreign claims.
The missions are amongst the oldest surviving man-made structures in California, and the California Department of State Parks and Recreation recognizes the Historic Mission Trail, approximately the path of US-101, and also called El Camino Real (the Royal Road). You’ll find the full list here. Personally, I have previously visited the missions in San Diego and San Juan Capistrano, the latter being the remains of the building that collapsed in an earthquake in 1812, just a few years after it was finished. In this trip, we visited three others: Sonoma, Carmel, and San Luis Obispo.
Sonoma: Mission San Francisco Solano
Sonoma’s mission is the northernmost and the last of the missions, established in 1823. There’s a bit more to be said of its role in California history, but that will wait for a later diary. This mission is no longer associated with the Catholic Church, and is administered by the California Department of Parks and Recreation. Right in front of the entrance was a huge prickly pear cactus with an immense number of blooms.
Altar and pulpit:
Here’s a gate on a passage allowing carts into the courtyard of the mission.
My photos of the courtyard are marred by my finger being in them. Sorry about that.
Carmel: Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo
Carmel’s mission is still controlled and operated by the Catholic Church, and is in fact the resting place of Father Junipero Serra himself. Native Americans have rightly demonized him for the destruction visited on them by the establishment of the missions, but, nonetheless, the Church has seen fit to canonize Serra. He is now a saint.
The mission itself is lovely.
The gardens:
Hubby found his favorite rose here, called the Belle of Portugal:
The altar. To the right, under the painting is a reliquary containing the pieces of Fr. Serra’s original coffin. At least there are no body parts, as is the case with some Catholic saints.
Here is the icon in the Marian Chapel. Pope John Paul II prayed before this icon when he visited the mission. I will admit that my lapsed Catholicism relapsed briefly enough to light a candle here for my late mother.
Franciscan doors have this wavy pattern, which my mother-in-law said was meant to represent the “flow of life.”
The museum had a remarkable display of rooms set up as they would have been when the mission was still a mission.. Here are three shots of the kitchen:
And here is Fr. Serra’s own cell:
San Luis Obispo: Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa
This mission, like the one in Carmel, is still under the control of the Catholic Church, and appears to function as a parish church.
The interior had beautiful decorative wall painting.
The Pieta in the Marian Chapel, which I found quite moving. (Again, I guess my lapse was slipping.)
The courtyard had the best gardens of the three we saw on this trip.
There was also a small museum, but we didn’t have enough time to see much of it before it closed.
That concludes today’s installment. More to come…
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