Mission Santa Bárbara

The Story

Father Fermín Francisco de Lasuén founded Santa Bárbara on December 4, 1786, the feast of St. Barbara, two years after Serra's death. Serra had hoped to found it himself but was blocked by a dispute with the governor. The Chumash people, who lived in large coastal towns along this stretch of the channel, built the mission and its stone waterworks, including a reservoir still used by the city and a lavandería fed through a carved stone spout.

The 1812 earthquake destroyed the third church, and the stone church that replaced it was finished in 1820. Its façade was drawn from a Roman treatise on architecture, and a matching second tower was added in 1831, giving the mission the twin-towered front that earned it the name Queen of the Missions. The 1925 earthquake brought the towers down, and they were rebuilt.

Santa Bárbara later became the headquarters of the mission chain and the seat of California's first bishop in 1842. Franciscans have served here continuously since 1786, one of only two missions where that is true. Visitors see the church and its six bells, the cemetery and Chumash burial ground, the museum rooms, the gardens, and the Mission Archive-Library, which holds documents dating back to the 1760s.

Church Recognition

Mission Santa Bárbara was founded on December 4, 1786 by Fr. Fermín Francisco de Lasuén. It is the tenth of the twenty-one missions of Alta California, and today it is parish church, museum, franciscan friary and retreat house.

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 Queen of the Missions, with twin bell towers and an unbroken Franciscan presence since 1786.

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