Mission San Francisco de Asís is a Christian religious center that was established by Spanish Roman Catholic priests in California. The Franciscan missionary Saint Junípero Serra founded the mission on June 29, 1776, in what is now San Francisco. American Indian laborers built the mission and were its earliest members. The settlement was named for Saint Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan order of Roman Catholicism. The mission has long been called Mission Dolores, after a nearby creek called the Arroyo de los Dolores (Creek of Sorrows).
A simple adobe structure, Mission Dolores is the oldest building in San Francisco and the oldest intact mission in California. The mission churchyard is the only cemetery within San Francisco’s city limits. Cemetery markers date from 1830 to 1898. The cemetery has the graves of several thousand Ohlone, Miwok, and other American Indians; of Luís Antonio Argüello, the first native Californian to serve as governor of Alta California (upper California) when it was under Mexican rule; and of Francisco de Haro, San Francisco’s first mayor. The gardens of Mission Dolores are planted with trees, shrubs, flowers, and plants native to central California.
Spanish missionaries established the original church at Mission Dolores five days before the American colonists signed the Declaration of Independence. The current structure was completed in 1791, and it has withstood the fog, damp conditions, and earthquakes of San Francisco. The mission added a larger church building, the Mission Dolores Basilica, next to the original building in 1918. Mission Dolores remains an active Catholic parish. It rings its original church bells every year during Holy Week, the period between Palm Sunday and Easter.
