Mission San Fernando is the seventeenth of the twenty-one California missions the Franciscan order established under Father Junípero Serra, a chain that began in 1769. Mission San Fernando Rey de España was founded on September 8, 1797, on land the Spanish called the Valley of Santa Catalina de Bononia, which the Tataviam and Tongva peoples had inhabited for millennia. The mission system operated as a combination of religious conversion, agricultural labor, and cultural suppression: the indigenous people who were baptized were required to live at the mission, work its fields and workshops, and abandon their languages and spiritual practices.
Disease and overwork reduced the Tongva and Tataviam populations catastrophically in the mission era. The long convento building beside you — 243 feet long with 21 Roman arches — is the largest original free-standing adobe structure in California. After the Mexican secularization of the missions in 1833 the buildings fell into ruin, were badly damaged in the 1971 and 1994 earthquakes, and have been repeatedly restored.
The mission cemetery holds more than two thousand people, the vast majority of them Native Californians whose names are not recorded.