Mission San Juan Bautista

The Story

Lasuén founded San Juan Bautista on June 24, 1797, the feast of St. John the Baptist. The Mutsun Ohlone people of the surrounding villages built the mission. The church was designed unusually wide, with three aisles divided by arches, to hold a growing community, and it is the largest of the mission churches.

The 1812 earthquake damaged the arches badly, and the friars walled up the side aisles for safety. They stayed closed for more than 160 years until a 1975 restoration reopened them and restored the original three-aisle plan. The floor tiles still carry the paw prints of animals that walked across them while they dried in the sun two centuries ago. The church holds the most complete set of apostolate paintings in the chain.

The mission sits directly on the San Andreas Fault, and an exhibit outside the walls marks the fault line and a surviving stretch of El Camino Real. The plaza in front is preserved as San Juan Bautista State Historic Park, with the Plaza Hotel, stable, and other 1800s buildings around it, so a visitor sees not only a mission but a whole Spanish-era town.

Church Recognition

Mission San Juan Bautista was founded on June 24, 1797 by Fr. Fermín Francisco de Lasuén. It is the fifteenth of the twenty-one missions of Alta California, and today it is active parish church and adjoining state historic park.

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 largest mission church and the only one with three aisles, standing on the San Andreas Fault.

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