The Last Fortress and the Hands That Built It

Construction of El Presidio de Santa Bárbara began on April twenty-first, seventeen eighty-two, under the direction of José Francisco Ortega, the first comandante. It was the fourth and final military installation Spain built in Alta California. More than that, it was the last military fortress the Spanish Empire built anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. Two hundred and forty years of colonization ended with these walls.

The labor force was Chumash. Local workers, directed by Spanish soldiers, formed the sun-dried adobe bricks and laid them on sandstone foundations quarried from the nearby hills. The Presidio, which existed to consolidate Spanish control over Chumash territory, to project force and administer a colonial frontier, was built by the hands of the people it was designed to control. This is not a minor irony. It is the central physical fact of the building.

El Cuartel, one of the surviving original structures, is the second-oldest existing building in California. It is one of those original adobe bricks, laid by Chumash workers in the seventeen eighties, that you can stand next to today. The wall is the same wall.

Spain built the Presidio. Chumash labor built it in the literal sense. Four years later, Mission Santa Barbara rose on the same landscape, and the system of directed labor became formalized. The Presidio and the mission together constituted the two institutional instruments of Spanish colonization in this corridor. One was military, one was religious. Both depended on Chumash work to physically exist.

The State Historic Park here preserves about a quarter of the original Presidio footprint. What has been excavated and stabilized gives a sense of the scale of the original compound. The bricks are still recognizable as hand-formed, dried in the sun, laid by workers whose names the official record did not preserve.