Mission Soledad: Our Lady of Solitude

The ruins and restoration here mark Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, founded on October ninth, seventeen ninety-one, as the thirteenth of the California Spanish missions. Father Fermín Lasuén named it for Our Lady of Solitude. The name may have come from an earlier Spanish explorer who heard a local Ohlone word that sounded like the Spanish word for loneliness.

The mission earned that name honestly. This stretch of the Salinas Valley was brutally exposed: too dry in summer, too wet and windy in winter. Adobe walls dissolved almost as fast as they could be built, and promised royal gifts from Mexico rarely arrived.

By eighteen thirty-five the mission was so diminished that its last Franciscan friar, Father Vicente Francisco de Sarría, is said to have died alone at the foot of the altar. The property passed into private hands and the buildings fell into ruin for roughly a century. Partial reconstruction began in the nineteen fifties.