El Presidio Real, the Fort That Founded the City
Near Santa Barbara, California
On the twenty first of April, seventeen eighty two, Spanish soldiers and a Franciscan padre raised a cross on this spot and founded El Presidio Real de Santa Barbara, the Royal Presidio. It was the last of four military forts Spain built along the coast of Alta California, and its job was to guard the missions, house soldiers and their families, and stake a claim against rival empires. Local Chumash people, working under Spanish supervision, made the sun dried adobe bricks and laid them on sandstone foundations, roofing the walls with red clay tile.
The buildings formed a quadrangle around a central parade ground, the Plaza de Armas, ringed by a defensive wall with two cannon bastions. One original structure survives. El Cuartel, the small adobe that housed the soldier guarding the western gate, is among the oldest buildings in Santa Barbara and the second oldest surviving building in all of California.
Today the site is El Presidio de Santa Barbara State Historic Park, where reconstructed rooms and a rebuilt chapel let you stand inside the very origin point of the city, the walled outpost that everything else grew around.
