Three mission sites with ruins were visible before 2012. Very little adobe ruin remains at the third site, in 2025.
Full name: Santo Tomás de Aquino
Founding date: April 24, 1791 (moved 1 mile east in 1794 and 3 more miles east in 1799) Mission #23
Catholic Order: Dominican
Founded by: Padre José Loriénte
Condition: Adobe ruins at final site, nearly vanished.
Closing date: Abandoned in 1849 (was the last California mission to be operating)
GPS: Site 3 (1799-1849) 31.558333, -116.413583; Site 2 (1794-1799) 31.573417, -116.466306; Site 1 (1791-1794) 31.569722, -116.480556
Access:
Site 3 Is in the field east side of Mex. #1, about Km. 49.5 (just north of Km. 50, El Palomar RV Park). The RV park was closed in 2025. Note the tall palm trees close to the ruins.
Site 2 The second Santo Tomás mission site was in a plowed field on the north side of the road, 2.8 miles from Highway 1 at Km. 47 (the road to La Bocana and Puerto Santo Tomás). It was obliterated by farming after 2009 .
Site 1 was in a camping area, 3.9 miles from Km. 47 (a miles west of site 2) on the south side of the arroyo (access road 3.6 miles from highway). The area was closed in 2017.
Read more: HERE
The Santo Tomás mission was first located some 2 1/2 miles west of the town of Santo Tomás. Two sets of ruins (1 mile apart) have been photographed and both called the first mission location (site #1 and site #2):
Peveril Meigs, in 1926 only documented site #2 and site #3. Meigs called site #2 the ‘first site’. Peter Gerhard (in 1956) and Michael Mathes (in 1977) do not mention site #2, only site #1 as the first site and a move in 1794 to site #3.
Zephyrin Engelhardt (1929) gives the year 1794 for a move “higher up” (p 575). Engelhardt (p 625) then provides the founding date of April 24, 1791, the first move in June, 1794, and a second move “on account of the lack of pastures” that was requested “8 years since the founding” (1799).
Site #1 is on the south side of the oak tree lined stream, on the valley floor. It should be considered the first location because mosquitos and flooding were reasons for a move “higher up”, made in 1794. The mountain blocking direct sunlight was also a concern, wrote one padre.
The move from site #2 (because of the “lack of pastures”) to the final site (#3) was made in 1799. Many adobe buildings were constructed there, yet almost nothing remains.
PHOTOS of the 3rd (1799-1849) Site
2025 Photos by David Kier & Dave W:
2017 by David Kier:
2005 by David Kier:
2003 by Jack Swords:
1975 by Robert Jackson:
1961 by Howard Gulick:
1956 by Howard Gulick:
1949 by Marquis McDonald:
1930 Photo by Margaret Bancroft:
1926 Photo by G.W. Hendry:
INAH plan drawn by Jorge Serrano González from 1991: Click to enlarge:
PHOTOS of the 2nd (1794-1799) Site
Peveril Meigs Mission Site Plans from his explorations in the mid-1920s:
PHOTOS of the 1st (1791-1794) Site
First 4 photos by David Kier in July 2011:
Next 3 photos are from November 2005:
1977:
1975:
MAP with three sites shown:
I hope this was interesting or informative for you! Please be welcome to join our Baja California Land of Missions Book Group, on Facebook: HERE
- All the missions, quick look and history, north to south: HERE
- Other mission photo pages plus more Baja California history: HERE
- VivaBaja.com home page
The following chapter is from my book, Baja California Land of Missions Order your own copy from Amazon Books: HERE
#23 Santo Tomás de Aquino (1791-1849)
The location for the twenty-third Baja California mission was
discovered in 1769 and named San Francisco Solano by
Franciscan Padre Juan Crespí. In April 1785, “San Solano” was
visited by Dominican Padre Luis Sáles and a party of soldiers
from the mission of San Vicente while searching for potential
mission sites. On one of the Padre Sáles expeditions to San
Solano, he was attacked by the native Indians, wounded, and
thrown from his horse. Sáles, “half-dead,” hid while the
Indians chased the soldiers, who returned later to rescue the
Dominican priest.
Mission Santo Tomás de Aquino was founded by Padre José
Loriénte on April 24, 1791 in the San Solano Valley. This was
at a place called by the natives Copaitl Coajocuc (crooked
sycamore). With this mission established, the Dominicans
fulfilled their mandate to occupy the frontier territory
between Mission San Fernando de Velicatá and San Diego.
The wide gap along El Camino Real between San Vicente and
San Miguel was bridged. The Indian neophyte population in
the first year at Santo Tomás was ninety-six.
A 1793 report described the mission church as a small adobe
structure fourteen feet by thirty-four feet with a roof of poles
and mats. A dwelling for the missionaries was also
constructed of the same materials. This first location chosen
for the mission had been questioned by Governor Fages
because it could be swept away by floods being in the narrow
part of the canyon. Also, sunlight would be blocked a third of
the day by the height of the hills.
According to a missionary’s letter, sickness developed the
second year at Santo Tomás, and he attributed the problem
to the marsh: “The heathen did not live where the mission is,
but further up the plain, where the air is pure and there are
no mosquitoes or gnats because the land is clearer.”
As the result of continual problems of mosquito infested
swamps and general unhealthy conditions at the first site, on
May 31, 1794, the mission was moved a mile east and higher
up the valley. This placed it on the north side of the arroyo,
with full sunlight. A new church building was made of adobe
with a roof of poles and tules (reeds). Another building of the
same materials was made for the priests.
Horses, mules, cattle, sheep, and goats were all raised at the
mission. Grain was planted and yields increased, yet in 1798
Padre Miguel López wrote to the governor asking that the
mission be moved one more time further east, where more
land could be put under cultivation.
In 1799, the mission did relocate again. The final move made
was just over three miles to the east, where four buildings
were constructed. In 1800, work continued on the church
and other buildings. The neophyte population reached the
highest at 262. The church was eighty-five feet long and
eighteen feet wide with a flat, earth-covered roof. A sacristy
was constructed twenty feet by fifteen feet in size. Several
other buildings were erected before 1801, including
storerooms and living quarters for single girls.
Raising crops and livestock all were successful at the third site
for the mission. Trading with foreign sea captains at the bay
of Ensenada (Ensenada de Todos Santos) twenty miles to the
north was reported. This exchange was an important source
of revenue during years of isolation while Mexico was
fighting Spain for independence from 1810 to 1821.
In the same year, two Dominican priests while serving at
Santo Tomás were murdered by mission Indians. Miguel
López was killed on January 13, 1803 at the hands of an
Indian by the name of Mariano Carillo. Eudaldo Surroca was
killed on May 17, 1803. Surroca was found dead in his bed,
the body was full of bruises and bone fractures. At least three
Indian domestics were involved, one confessed immediately
to the crime. Of the three, one was a woman named Barbara
Gandiága who instigated the killing of not only Surroca but of
López, four months earlier.
The year was 1849 and while Padre Tomás Mansilla was
visiting Mission San Diego de Alcalá he left his brother,
Agustín Mansilla y Gamboa, in charge at Santo Tomás. On
June 10, 1849, Agustín wrote to his brother Tomás that
people traveling north for the gold fields were stealing from
locals and from the church. An Indian was reported to have
stolen altar valuables and sold them to the “Forty-niners”
passing through. That seemed to be the final straw. Tomás
Mansilla returned from San Diego, abandoned his mission,
and traveled south to join Padre Gabriel González in the
southernmost region of Baja California. Mission Santo Tomás
de Aquino was the last operating California mission, closing
in 1849.
None of the three sites for this mission have any kind of
preservation. They are all on private property and INAH has
not performed any kind of protection as of this writing. The
photos illustrate the inevitable vanishing of these
unprotected adobe buildings.
The first (1791) site is nearly gone, with just a small section
of wall remaining next to an oak tree picnic area, along a
running stream. From Highway One on the north side of the
Santo Tomás Valley, take the graded dirt road west (signed
for La Bocana and Puerto Santo Tomás). Go 3.4 mi and take a
road to the left and go a half mile more to the clearing next
to the picnic area. In 2017, this former picnic area was closed.
The second (1794) mission site had only a small area of
melted adobe and rocks and was in a planted field when
visited in 2009. It was a few hundred feet north of the same
La Bocana road, about a mile closer to Highway One than the
first site. The distance from Highway One to the second site
is 2.8 mi. In 2012, satellite imaging showed the adobe area of
the mission having been removed and planted over.
Confirmed in 2017. Another mission site gone!
The 1799 third and final site is on the east side of Highway
One at the town of Santo Tomás. As you enter Santo Tomás
from the north, look near the tall palm trees just north of the
El Palomar campground. The mission aqueduct is near the
site and still carries water from the spring.
Some books mention only two sites for Santo Tomás. Some
books have called the second site “the first,” never
mentioning the extensive adobe complex once seen at the
true first site. Some books have not mentioned the second
site, mentioning only the first and final site. Some have
reported that road construction destroyed one site. I have
found adobe remains at all three sites that match locations
photographed in the past ninety years and identified as
mission sites.
Photographs show how the unprotected adobe brick walls
are susceptible to weathering. In a 1916 letter, about his
1887 expedition to save Dominican artifacts, Fr. James
Newall, O.P., made the following very poignant remark:
“But let us say at once, we found very little to describe. Since
Mexico’s achievement of independence from Spain, and the
expulsion of the Spanish Friars from the Peninsula — that is,
for a period of seventy years — those missions had been
utterly abandoned, and, what is worse, adventurers and
interlopers from Sonora — who constitute the present
owners of the Mission lands — after driving and killing off the
Indians, dismantled the churches and monasteries, seized on
and sold the valuable church furniture and works of art, and
even tore the tiles from the Mission roofs for their own huts,
thus exposing the walls to the dissolving action of the rains,
so that there is hardly a Mission in that country of which it
might not be said, Etiam ruinae perierunt! Even the ruins
have perished.”
Dominican Missionaries recorded at Santo Tomás:
José Loriénte (to 1798) April 24, 1791
Miguel López 1793-1803
Segismundo Fontcubierta 1798
Eudaldo Surroca 1802-1803
Juan Ríbas 1806
José Miguel de Pineda 1812-1826
Tomás Mansilla 1826-1849
Photos of the next mission south (San Vicente): https://vivabaja.com/san-vicente/