Old Town San Diego State Historic Park

The ground beneath Old Town San Diego is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in what is now the state of California. The Kumeyaay people had lived here for more than ten thousand years before any European arrived. Their village of Kosa'aay stood in this valley, home to dozens of families, when the Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo expedition first sailed into the bay in fifteen forty-two.

Permanent Spanish colonization came more than two centuries later. In the summer of seventeen sixty-nine, Gaspar de Portolá and Father Junípero Serra established the San Diego Presidio and Mission San Diego de Alcalá on the bluff above this valley. The Presidio was the northernmost outpost of New Spain, the first foothold in what Madrid called Alta California. The mission moved a few miles east to its current location in seventeen seventy-four to gain better farmland, but the military garrison and a growing civilian population remained here below the hill.

By the eighteen twenties a small Mexican pueblo had taken shape at the base of the Presidio hill, a loose collection of adobe buildings along what would become Old Town's central plaza. By eighteen thirty-four it had grown enough to earn official status as El Pueblo de San Diego. American annexation of California followed the Mexican-American War, and Old Town served briefly as the seat of San Diego County before a new downtown center shifted commercial life toward the bay.

The state park established here in nineteen sixty-eight now preserves and reconstructs the district as it appeared between eighteen twenty and eighteen seventy. Adobe buildings, a blacksmith shop, a schoolhouse, and the foundations of early ranchos give the place its texture. But beneath all of it lies the deeper history: ten millennia of Kumeyaay life, and then the collision of empires that made California.