Old Mission Santa Ines

Spanish Franciscans, following the trail Father Junipero Serra had begun in 1769, built their missions roughly a day's ride apart up the length of Alta California. By the early 1800s only one stretch remained unfilled, the country between Santa Barbara and La Purisima, home to the inland Chumash. Santa Ines was raised to fill it, dedicated in 1804 as the nineteenth link in the chain and the first outpost of European settlement in the Santa Ynez Valley.

The mission grew into a busy agricultural community, its Chumash converts tending herds and grain, its workshops turning out leather, cloth, and tallow, all fed by an ingenious system of aqueducts, mills, and reservoirs, much of which can still be traced on the grounds today. A powerful earthquake in December 1812 collapsed much of the original church, and the graceful adobe sanctuary visitors see now, with its long arcade, was rebuilt in the years that followed and finished in 1817.

Santa Ines is remembered as much for rebellion as for prayer. By the 1820s the Chumash who lived and labored at the missions were pressed hard: forced to work for the Mexican garrison, paid in worthless IOUs, and held under strict discipline. The breaking point came on February 21, 1824, when a Mexican soldier at Santa Ines badly beat a young Chumash man, and the valley's anger boiled over.

The Chumash rose up, set fire to much of the mission complex, and then withdrew when soldiers arrived. The revolt spread to Mission La Purisima and Mission Santa Barbara, becoming the largest organized Native uprising in the history of the California missions. After months of standoff and negotiation, the governor pardoned those who had taken part. The fires damaged buildings and smoke-stained the paintings in the sanctuary, and the event stands today as one of the clearest windows into what mission life really cost the people who lived it.

After Mexico secularized the missions in the 1830s, Santa Ines slipped into decline like the rest, its lands broken up and its buildings left to weather. But it found a second life in 1844, when part of the mission became the College of Our Lady of Refuge, the first seminary and the first institution of higher learning in California. That role gave the old adobe an outsized place in the state's history, as the classroom where California's earliest scholars were trained.

Restoration began in earnest in the twentieth century, and today the mission is once again an active Catholic parish cared for by its community. Because it never drew the crowds of the more famous missions, it kept an unusual amount of its original fabric, and it remains one of the most authentic and atmospheric stops on the entire mission trail.

The heart of the visit is the long adobe church with its painted walls and beamed ceiling, still cool and dim and full of the smell of old stone. Alongside it a museum holds treasures the mission has kept for two centuries, its collection of hand-worked vestments, the original mission bells, and a room devoted to the Madonna Chapel with its carved wooden altar and period paintings, some still bearing the marks of the 1824 fires.

Outside, walk the arcade and the gardens for the view that first drew the padres here, the Santa Ynez River valley spread out below and the mountains beyond. Wander the old cemetery, where crosses and headstones stand scattered across the side yard rather than in tidy rows, and look for the traces of the original water system, the mills and reservoirs that once made the desert bloom. Give yourself an unhurried hour, and it becomes the perfect quiet counterpoint to the Danish bakeries and windmills a few blocks down the hill in Solvang.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.