"El Camino Real was a product of the same impulse that gave us the Spanish Colonial Revival in architecture – imparting an exotic hue to the region as a way to attract more tourists and settlers." "There might have been some kind of more or less continuous footpath, but it was not a regularly traveled thoroughfare," Roth explains.
Today's El Camino Real is largely a "booster myth," says Matthew Roth of the Automobile Club of Southern California Archives. To clothe El Camino Real with mythic significance, they invented sentimental stories about Franciscan fathers traveling along the road from mission to mission, which were supposedly spaced one day apart along the trail. Regional boosters saw California's missions – some of which still functioned as parish churches, but many of them long-neglected and crumbling into ruin – as a place where tourists could commune with California's romantic past from the comfort of their modern machines. The second was a reinterpretation of Spanish colonial California as a romantic paradise, fueled by the 1884 publication of Helen Hunt Jackson's "Ramona" and set within a broader cultural embrace of Southern California as a American Mediterranean retreat – "Our Italy," as Charles Dudley Warner titled his 1891 book on the region. Regional boosters saw California's missions – many of them long-neglected and crumbling into ruin – as a place where tourists could commune with California's romantic past from the comfort of their modern machines. Ships rather than the so-called royal road usually transported goods and passengers over long distances.īy the late nineteenth century, although local segments of the old trail were still heavily used, the route as a whole had faded into obscurity. Furthermore, while the road provided local transportation links between colonial settlements, the primitive highway was eclipsed in importance by a coastal water route between Alta California's south and north. The road's exact route was not fixed the actual path changed over time as weather, mode of travel, and even the tides dictated. But the stories told today about the footpath diverge from its actual history. In Alta California, one such road helped link the presidios (military forts), pueblos (civil towns), and religious missions that Spain furiously began building in 1769 to parry the territorial ambitions of Russia and Britain.
Another extended from Mexico City to Sonora and thence to Santa Fe. One well-established trail in Baja California preceded Alta California's by several decades. These highways linked Spanish settlements in far-flung provinces to administrative centers. The message implied by the presence of the mission bells – that motorists' tires trace the same path as the missionaries' sandals – is largely myth.Īlthough the definite article in the road's name suggests otherwise, California's El Camino Real was just one of many government roads that stretched through Spain's New World empire.
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