Carmel Mission and Junipero Serra

Behind these thick stone walls lies the beating heart of Spanish California. This is Mission San Carlos Borromeo del Carmelo, founded by the Franciscan friar Junipero Serra in the year seventeen seventy near Monterey, then moved the following year to the mouth of the Carmel River, where fresh water and fertile land waited. Serra was born on the island of Mallorca in Spain in seventeen thirteen.

He crossed the ocean to New Spain, and rather than ride, he walked to Mexico City, injuring a leg that troubled him the rest of his life. As president of the missions he founded nine outposts stretching from San Diego to San Francisco, and he made Carmel his headquarters and his favorite home. When he died here on the twenty eighth of August, seventeen eighty four, they buried him beneath the sanctuary floor, near the altar, where he lies to this day.

The graceful stone basilica you see now was raised between seventeen ninety three and seventeen ninety seven, built of golden sandstone from the Santa Lucia mountains, bound with lime mortar burned from abalone shells gathered on the beach. Its curving Moorish tower still holds its original bell, the Ave Maria, cast in Mexico City. For more than sixty years this was the command center for the whole chain of Alta California missions, the place from which a Spanish empire tried to reshape a coast.

But the mission's story carries deep sorrow alongside its beauty, and honesty requires we speak of it. The mission system drew the Rumsen Ohlone and Esselen peoples into a world of forced labor and confinement, cut off from their own villages and traditions, and disease, hunger, and overwork devastated them. By the eighteen thirties the mission's own records counted thousands of baptisms and thousands of burials, a grim ledger of what had happened to the first people of this valley.

When Pope Francis declared Serra a saint in twenty fifteen, the moment reopened old wounds. Two Ohlone people took part in the canonization Mass, yet within days this mission was vandalized and a statue toppled. Some honor Serra as the founder of California; others, including Ohlone and Esselen descendants, see a man who imposed his faith and helped shatter a way of life.

Both truths stand together in this quiet courtyard, under the same old bells.