Mission San Juan Capistrano at 250

It’s the mission that best expresses the economic, social, and cultural roots of modern California.

I didn’t think I’d write another America 250 story, but feliz cumpleaños to Mission San Juan Capistrano in the pretty Orange County town named for the place Father Junipero Serra (1713–1784) established on November 1, 1776. Why raise America 250, which I thought done and over with my pieces on Mount Rushmore and Monticello? Last month, when I visited the mission, I knew it was a historic site, but I didn’t realize 2026 was a landmark year for it.

San Juan Capistrano is called the Jewel of the Missions and was the seventh of 21 Franciscan evangelical outposts from San Diego to Sonoma built between 1769 and 1823. It’s a romantic ruin in a place — southern California — where new is best and old, well, gets the wrecking ball unless it’s Neutra. It’s also been an icon of California’s sense of self for well over a hundred years. Ignorantly trashed by the obvious suspects, the Franciscan padres and the missions still have much to teach us. Ruins speak, too, as do the dead and as does historic preservation.

The mission’s ten-acre site is formidably walled but smack in the center of town and its busy streets. We can see the top of the ruins of the mission’s Great Stone Church, the tallest building west of the Mississippi until it tumbled in the 1812 earthquake, a scant six years after it was finished, during Mass and killing dozens. Seeing it from the outside evokes the healing salve inside, a vast courtyard with hummingbirds and butterflies from Central Casting.

It was, of course, not always thus. In ye olden times the courtyard was a workspace and the mission was a massive working ranch, with thousands of animals, run by the Franciscans and an evangelizing hub. The California missions, contrary to what many think, weren’t in business for hundreds of years but rather a couple of generations at most. By the 1820s most were in sad shape. The Mexicans secularized them in 1833 after their revolt from imperial Spain and, in 1865, with California now a state, President Lincoln ordered San Juan Capistrano returned to the Catholic Church.

It moldered for years, with squatters living in some of the deteriorating buildings, possibly a bordello in part of it during the Mexican years, and later a single priest, Father José Mut, doing his limited best. That is, until the Mission Revival movement started in the late 1880s with the publication of the novel Ramona, the arrival of the railroad to Orange County, a burst of design Hispanophilia, and the arrival also of Father John O’Sullivan in 1910. O’Sullivan (1874–1933), tubercular but fervent and a natural builder, led the restoration charge. Father Flanagan did Boys Town. Fulton Sheen had a TV show. Father Berrigan went full-throated Bolshie. O’Sullivan, marketeer, historian, decorator, and reno maven, brought San Juan Capistrano back to life.

Starting in the 1910s and into the ’30s, he raised the interest, money, and labor for new, formal gardens — but not so formal as to be fussy and fake — and the very pretty Fountain of the Four Evangelists. Once beyond the hustle and bustle, that’s what we see. There are tours, but I followed a loop on my own, informed by succinct interpretation, rusticated, slanted panels rising discreetly from the ground.

The loop’s paths took me through the Great Stone Church’s ruins, the mission cemetery, and Father Serra’s Chapel. The old dining hall displays furniture from Father Mut’s days, in part inspiring Gustav Stickley’s Arts & Crafts designs. He was one of the early visitors curious about the mission, which was among the few palpable links to Spanish California and to, for Anglo Californians, ancient history. What’s a church without a cemetery? In San Juan Capistrano’s repose, around 3,000 neophytes — Native converts — and celebrities like O’Sullivan. It’s lovely and hushed.

There’s a small Serra museum off arcaded walkways — it’s good and straightforward — and then archaeological digs for the tallow cooking area, worker dorms, and California’s first winery. Yes, the first recorded winery in California dates to 1783 and the beguiling red — and white — beverage made from the Mission grape, genetically identical to Listan Priéto, Spanish and light-bodied with hints of tart cherry, gentle clove, salt, and, I’m told, the forest floor. I’m a teetotaler and “hints of the forest floor” make me want to keep it that way. A mission needs sacramental wine, of course, but a nip here and there makes the day pass.

I consider San Juan Capistrano a teaching museum and a history museum, but it’s also, as its website tells us, “a place of faith, renewal, and celebration.” The Great Stone Church might be a ruin, and it’s an impressive one and our version of the U.K.’s monastic ruins, but Serra’s chapel is still used for services. The old bells, four original, still ring. Beyond the mission walls, at the edge of the property and facing the street is the Mission Basilica San Juan Capistrano. It opened in 1986.

We know Father Serra confirmed 213 locals in the chapel in 1783. Not much is original, but it’s atmospheric. It wasn’t schmatzed in the 1812 earthquake. The wall decoration is a copy of what was there in Serra’s time, and the retablo — the altarpiece — was brought from Barcelona in 1806 and is standard but effective. O’Sullivan acquired it in 1922. It suits what’s the oldest church in California still standing.

Old Spanish churches, “old” meaning from Medieval days, tend not to have altarpieces with a central, big painting and smaller painting in support of it. That’s Italian, but Italian style was considered snappy and new. The retablo is a flat board to which small paintings or sculptures are placed in rows, the central image, usually a miracle maker, not much bigger than the others if not the same size. The effect is a glittering, patterned surface that owes something to Islamic design. There are, I’m told, 50 carved and painted putti, too, most of them smiling.

Until the last 20 years or so, California — bountiful, sunny, and lush — seemed the consummation of America’s promise. Movies, innovation, business, fertile soil, sweet sea breezes, and a can-do spirit leavened by a laidback vibe — that was the Golden State. Alas, the goose that lays the golden egg is in Alcatraz, on Death Row, metaphorically, but let’s celebrate what has to be one of the first chapters in California’s story as an economic, social, and cultural powerhouse. The story has to start with Serra and the missions.

Born into a Majorcan farm family, he was a Franciscan priest and philosophy professor before volunteering for missionary work in the New World. Over 35 years, he led the Franciscan proselytizing remit in Alta California, singularly pious, a visionary, self-denying, and a trooper, literally. He often refused a four-legged conveyance and walked thousands of miles for God and humanity. Of course, he’s become a target and is said to have promoted forced labor, forced conversions, torture, and cultural eradication. The worst of the history fantasists will have him the Mission Mengele. They’re crazy. Pope Francis seemed to have flipped them the cliff swallows back in Capistrano and canonized him in 2015. He’s now Saint Serra.

Serra and the missions go mano a mano along with Ramona, Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel about southland angst among mixed race, native, and old Spanish grandees in the years just after the end of the Mexican War and California’s statehood. It’s the best-selling American novel between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone with the Wind and put the missions on the national map. Jackson (1830–1895) was a high-minded, well-born Yankee lady and a Unitarian. She was also appalled in the 1870s by the living conditions of what were called the Mission Indians. These were natives who converted when the missions were thriving and, during their long decrepitude, stayed in the villages the missions fostered. She felt the federal government had failed them.

There’s a romance (two of them, in fact), betrayal, penury, Spanish pride, gringo greed, disorder, disarray, and an ending that’s not entirely happy but is entirely satisfactory.The old missions, all by the 1850s a visible presence and a living memory, don’t propel the plot but set the mood — their collapse was a societal one — and lent an exotic setting new to American readers. Mission padres come and go at pregnant moments.

Hunt died a year after Ramona hit the bestseller list and would have been doubly appalled to know her book cast klieg lights not on the poor Native Americans but on the picturesque, evocative mission ruins and the missions as pillars of order, Christianity, and, of all things, capitalism. The old missions, though tattered, still had their massive adobe walls, projecting eaves, arcades, arches, terracotta roofs, and bell gables, enough to lend the tens of thousands of émigrés from the Northeast and Midwest a new vernacular architecture called Mission Revival.

How was mission history taught in California? The mission friars designed and built an environment, but what about an economy? The mission farms were self-sufficient, vertically integrated, and diversified — kinda. The natives learned workplace discipline and the values of hierarchy and deference to authority — sorta. Father Serra was an entrepreneur, a benevolent despot, and, of course, a holy man. He also inspired deference to authority. At the U.S. Capitol, in the Hall of Statuary, he’s one of two heroes representing California. The other is Ronald Reagan.

All of this said, the missions, run by priests and Spanish acculturated, failed because they were feudal and devalued free labor, private property, investment, and innovation. Still, I’ve been to about a dozen renovated and reimagined missions over the years and think San Juan Capistrano does the best in conveying their economic and business complexity. Needless to say, students learned that Yankees, Hoosiers, Buckeyes, and others from good, Northern European stock would and could do better. In Ramona, it takes a sheriff born and bred in New England to put everything and everyone on solid, future-focused footing. And starting in the 1890s, real-estate developers and brokers pushed the mission ruins and restored missions as evidence of a historical pulse but also romantic and endearing and hacienda living something within reach for newcomers.

Do the swallows still come back to Capistrano? The short answer is yes, but it was iffy a few years ago. Swallows, or the migratory cliff swallows, winter in Argentina but for at least a century notably returned in great numbers to Southern California in mid-March to live among the nooks, eaves, ruins, fountains, and fruit trees of the mission grounds. It’s said Father O’Sullivan saw a shopkeeper in town destroying swallow nests with a broom. Birds being birds, they weren’t potty trained. “Come to the mission,” he said to the feathered displaced, recalling that Saint Francis preached a whole sermon to birds.

They came, they saw, they nested — and kept coming back. O’Sullivan saw this as a not-birdbrained marketing op and insinuated March 19 into southland minds as an annual event to be celebrated. It gave the town, still small and agricultural, cachet. In 1940, the Ink Spots had a hit with Leon René’s When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano, a sultry lover-come-back tune later sung by Pat Boone and the Five Satins. René, by the by, must have had a bird fetish. His other big hit was Rockin’ Robin.

The Fiesta de las Golondrinas, held every year on March 19, is a countywide event with an impressive parade, Spanish dancing and music, and mission bell ringing. Its population of 35,000 is now over 40 percent Latino, so the event’s more and more a show of South of the Border flair. It’s the largest non-motorized parade in America.

For years the swallows stopped coming, preferring, my spies told me, the local mall. Evidently, a remodel at the mission removed old mud nests and, let’s face it, with an Iron King Mongolian BBQ, Jamba Juice, and a Nordstrom Cafe a few flaps away, foraging’s easier. Starting in the mid-’90s, though, the mission’s been playing recorded mating calls, installed artificial nests, and slathered tasty bug pâté in strategic spots. The results are promising.

“We’re in the business of creating awe,” the mission’s jefes tell us, and they do it well. The place has a six-language audio tour and educates 50,000 local schoolchildren a year. Annual visitorship is about 300,000. I loved my visit and wish the place well. The Franciscan missions are an integral and, by and large, positive part of our story.