Mission Santa Cruz

The Story

Lasuén founded the twelfth mission on August 28, 1791, and named it for the Holy Cross. It had a hard history. In 1797 the Spanish planted a pueblo of retired soldiers and former convicts directly across the river, and those neighbors took mission crops and labor for years. When the privateer Hipólito Bouchard threatened the coast in 1818, the community evacuated and townspeople looted what was left behind.

Secularization in 1834 finished the decline, and earthquakes in 1857 brought down the church tower and walls. Nothing of the original church remains standing. In 1931 a replica chapel was built nearby at roughly a third the size of the original, paid for by a local benefactor. It holds statues, paintings, and a chalice associated with the mission era.

The active parish next door, Holy Cross Church, dates from 1889 and serves the neighborhood today. A block downhill, the Santa Cruz Mission State Historic Park preserves the 1824 Neary-Rodriguez Adobe, a surviving section of the mission's long adobe row that housed Native families, and it is one of the very few such buildings left anywhere in California. Visitors can see both in an easy walk.

Church Recognition

Mission Santa Cruz was founded on August 28, 1791 by Fr. Fermín Francisco de Lasuén. It is the twelfth of the twenty-one missions of Alta California, and today it is replica chapel beside holy cross parish, with an 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

A rare surviving adobe row where mission-era Native families lived, preserved a block from the chapel.

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