Mission San Francisco de Asís (Mission Dolores)

The Story

Father Francisco Palóu celebrated the first Mass at a camp near a small lagoon on June 29, 1776, five days before the Declaration of Independence was signed on the other side of the continent. The mission was formally dedicated on October 9, 1776, and named for St. Francis of Assisi, though everyone came to call it Mission Dolores after the nearby Arroyo de los Dolores.

The adobe chapel finished in 1791 is the oldest intact building in San Francisco. Its four-foot walls and redwood roof beams, lashed with rawhide, held firm through the 1906 earthquake and fire that leveled much of the city. Inside are the original redwood ceiling painted in Ohlone designs and an altar brought from Mexico.

A far larger church was built beside the chapel in 1918 and raised to the rank of minor basilica by Pope Pius XII in 1952. The cemetery between them is one of the few original burial grounds left in the city, and it holds an estimated 5,000 Ohlone and Miwok graves, most of them unmarked. A memorial and a reconstructed tule hut honor them.

Church Recognition

Mission San Francisco de Asís (Mission Dolores) was founded on October 9, 1776 by Fr. Francisco Palóu, under St. Junípero Serra as father president. It is the sixth of the twenty-one missions of Alta California, and today it is minor basilica with the original adobe chapel alongside. It holds the title of minor basilica.

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

The oldest intact building in San Francisco, which survived the 1906 earthquake and fire.

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