Virtual Guidebook to El Camino Real
Mission la Soledad
Near Soledad in the Salinas Valley, Monterey County, California
 
Officially the name is "Misíon Nuestra Señora Dolorosísima de la Soledad": the mission of our most sorrowful lady of solitude. It was sited out in the barren flats of the central Salinas Valley and never prospered. It suffered from earthquakes and floods and was abandoned after only forty years, its adobe walls melting back into the soil from which they were made. The last of the California missions to be restored, in 1954, today it has a small chapel and museum in good repair.

But for me the reason to stop at la Soledad is to gaze on the remaining mud walls. There is something terribly melancholy about these silent reminders of our mortality, and the futility of efforts to build and improve. The Spanish fathers are long gone, and so are the Indian neophytes — in fact their entire world has vanished. Only the mud bricks remain, and they grow smaller and softer in outline every year. The walls were noticeably taller when I first went there, thirty years ago. A few more decades and there will only be lines of stones to mark their location.
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Next: Mission San Miguel