San Francisco - Mission Dolores

Mission Dolores, or, to give it its proper title, the Mission San Francisco de Assisi, was the sixth of 21 missions founded on the California coast by Franciscans from Mexico. Father Junípero Serra (b. 1713 in Petr, Majorca, d. 1784 in Carmel) laid the foundation-stone on October 9th 1776. The building, completed in 1791, is thus the oldest in San Francisco.

It is 110ft/34m long and 21ft/6m wide with walls nearly 4ft/1.2m thick. The restored ceiling is decorated with pictures painted by Indians using pigments made from natural dyes. In the mission there were a total of 28,000 baptisms, mainly of Indians. The basilica close by the mission dates from 1918; an earlier church was, unlike the mission, destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. The Baroque altar comes from Mexico. Documents about the history of the mission are displayed in a special room. The cemetery, later reduced in size, was used for burials from the 1780s until the end of the 19th century. Among those laid to rest were more than 5,000 Indians who perished in the two great measles epidemics of 1814 and 1826.

As well as being one of the few sights in San Francisco south of Market Street, Mission Dolores is also the only one of the 21 missions to be now in the center of a great city and thus easily visited.