Picture forty-four settlers arriving on the west bank of the Los Angeles River on September 4, 1781, to found this pueblo. On September 4, 1781, a group of forty-four settlers — a mixed-race community of Native American, African, and Spanish ancestry recruited from the missions and presidios of northern Mexico — arrived here on the west bank of the Los Angeles River and founded El Pueblo de la Reina de los Ángeles, the Town of the Queen of the Angels. They were guided by Father Junípero Serra's Franciscan mission network and Governor Felipe de Neve, who laid out the plaza and assigned plots of land.
The settlers built adobe homes, planted fields, and within a generation had established the largest civilian settlement in Alta California. Olvera Street, the narrow pedestrian lane beside you, was paved over and forgotten by the early twentieth century, then saved and reopened in 1930 by civic activist Christine Sterling as a Mexican marketplace. Today it retains the look and feel of a nineteenth-century Mexican street.
The Avila Adobe at the far end is the oldest surviving building in Los Angeles, built around 1818.