Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad

The Story

Lasuén founded Nuestra Señora de la Soledad on October 9, 1791, in a windy stretch of the Salinas Valley. The name came from a misunderstanding years earlier, when a Native woman answered the Portolá expedition with a word the Spanish heard as soledad, solitude. The Esselen and Ohlone people of the valley built and worked the mission.

Life here was harder than at most missions. Floods repeatedly destroyed the church, crops failed, and epidemics struck the community. Governor José Joaquín de Arrillaga died at Soledad in 1814 and is buried in the chapel. Father Vicente Francisco de Sarría, who had served the mission for years, collapsed and died at the altar in 1835, by then the last friar left, ministering to the few who remained.

After secularization the adobe walls dissolved in the rains. The Native Daughters of the Golden West rebuilt the small chapel in 1955, and the wing beside it was restored in the 1960s as a museum. Visitors today find the chapel, the museum rooms, a cemetery, a garden, and low melted adobe ruins that outline the old quadrangle. It is a quiet stop and easy to reach from Highway 101.

Church Recognition

Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad was founded on October 9, 1791 by Fr. Fermín Francisco de Lasuén. It is the thirteenth of the twenty-one missions of Alta California, and today it is chapel and museum.

The mission was built by Native Californians, and the Church has publicly acknowledged the coercion and harm that mission life involved. That history is told in full on the California Mission Trail page, and it belongs to this place as much as its founding date does.

Go Deeper

Its name, Our Lady of Solitude, and the friar who died at its altar serving the last of his flock.

This mission is one of the twenty-one on the California Mission Trail, the thirteenth to be founded. The trail page carries the history of the chain as a whole, including the Church's own reckoning with it.