Mission San Miguel Arcángel

The Story

Lasuén founded San Miguel Arcángel on July 25, 1797, in the Salinas River valley, filling the long gap between San Antonio and San Luis Obispo. The Salinan people of the region built it. A fire in 1806 destroyed the first church and most of the year's harvest.

The replacement church, finished in 1818, has adobe walls six feet thick. Its interior was painted by Salinan artists working with the Catalan craftsman Esteban Munras, and those frescoes, including a painted all-seeing eye above the altar and columns and cornices done in trompe l'oeil, have never been retouched or repainted. No other mission can say that.

Secularization stripped the mission, and for decades parts of it served as a saloon, a store, and a dance hall. The Franciscans returned in 1928. The 2003 San Simeon earthquake caused serious damage and closed the church for six years; it reopened in 2009 after a major seismic retrofit, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation had listed it among America's most endangered places. Today it is an active parish of the Diocese of Monterey, with a museum, a long arched corridor, a cemetery holding about 2,000 burials, and gardens.

Church Recognition

Mission San Miguel Arcángel was founded on July 25, 1797 by Fr. Fermín Francisco de Lasuén. It is the sixteenth of the twenty-one missions of Alta California, and today it is active parish church 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

The only mission church whose original interior murals have never been repainted.

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