Mission San Francisco de Asís

Push open the heavy wooden door and the air changes at once. It is cooler in here, and dimmer, and the noise of Dolores Street falls away behind you. The floor is worn smooth by generations of feet. Overhead, dark beams run the width of the room, and the walls around you are thick enough to hold the chill of the morning long into the afternoon. You are standing inside the oldest intact building in San Francisco.

Most people in the city simply call this place Mission Dolores. The official name honours Saint Francis of Assisi, the same saint who gave San Francisco its name. The nickname comes from a nearby creek that Spanish explorers called the Arroyo de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, the stream of Our Lady of Sorrows. The creek is long gone now, buried beneath the streets, but the name stayed with the building.

The story of this mission begins in 1776. That is the same year the American colonies declared independence on the other side of the continent. Here, on the edge of the Pacific, a small Spanish party arrived from the south. A Franciscan friar named Francisco Palóu led an early mass in a simple shelter of branches. It was the sixth of what would become twenty-one missions strung along the California coast, a chain begun under the direction of the friar Junípero Serra.

But this land was not empty. It was the home of the Yelamu, a group of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, who had lived around the bay for thousands of years. They fished, gathered acorns and shellfish, and moved through a landscape of dunes, creeks and oak. The arrival of the mission changed their world completely. Many Ohlone were brought into mission life, baptised, and set to work. Disease, crowding and loss of their land followed, and the death toll was severe.

That painful history is part of the building itself. The church you are standing in was completed in 1791, and much of the labour that raised it was Ohlone labour. The walls are made of adobe, sun-dried bricks of clay, sand and straw. They are roughly four feet thick. That mass of earth is the reason the room stays so cool, and it is also part of the reason the church has lasted more than two centuries.

Now look up. This is the detail many visitors miss. The ceiling is painted with bold patterns of red, ochre, grey and white. These designs are based on traditional Ohlone motifs, and the colours were made from natural plant and mineral pigments. The redwood beams were originally lashed together with rawhide, not nails. So above the Spanish altar, the ceiling carries the artistic language of the people who were here first.

At the front of the church stands the altar screen, a tall carved and gilded wall of saints and columns. Pieces like this were made in Mexico and carried north by ship, a long and costly journey in the late eighteenth century. In the candlelight of an early service, the gold would have glowed against the plain white walls. Even today, with electric light, it draws the eye forward the moment you enter.

Here is the second surprise. In 1906, a great earthquake and the fires that followed destroyed much of San Francisco. Next to this small adobe stood a much larger brick church, built in the later nineteenth century. That newer church was badly damaged and had to be torn down. The old adobe, with its thick earthen walls and wooden frame, came through the shaking still standing. The oldest building outlasted the younger one.

When you step back outside, you will see what replaced that ruined church. The large building next door is the Basilica of Mission Dolores, finished in the years after the earthquake. Its style is very different, with ornate towers and a carved entrance inspired by Spanish colonial churches. In the early 1950s, the Pope gave it the special title of basilica. Side by side, the two buildings tell the city's story in miniature: a modest beginning, then growth, then rebuilding.

Beside the old church lies the cemetery. It is one of only two cemeteries still inside the city limits. Most burial grounds were moved out of San Francisco in the early twentieth century, but this one remained. Among the roses and old headstones are the graves of early settlers and Californian leaders, including Luis Antonio Argüello, the first governor of Alta California under Mexican rule.

Yet the headstones show only a small part of who rests here. Records suggest that thousands of Ohlone and other Native people were buried on these grounds, most without any marker at all. A memorial in the garden remembers them. Walk slowly here. The quiet of this garden is the quiet of a place where far more people lie than you can see.

Film lovers sometimes come for another reason. Alfred Hitchcock shot scenes for his 1958 thriller Vertigo in this cemetery. In the film, the character played by Kim Novak visits the grave of a woman named Carlotta Valdes. That grave was a prop, and it was removed after filming. Fans still search for the spot, but the real stones here belong to real people, not to the movie.

Before you leave, stand for a moment on the pavement and look at the whitewashed front of the old church. Notice how small it is beside the basilica, and how low and solid it sits on the ground. Listen to the traffic on Dolores Street, the voices drifting up from the park a few blocks away. Then look again at those thick earthen walls. They were raised by many hands, in a very different world, and they are still here, holding the cool, dim air inside.