Picture this hilltop on July 16, 1769, when Father Junípero Serra and Gaspar de Portolá planted Alta California's first European flag. The Presidio — a walled military garrison — occupied this hilltop for decades, commanding views of the bay, the river valley, and the surrounding territory of the Kumeyaay people, who had inhabited this land for at least ten thousand years before the Spanish arrived. Serra famously rang a bell from a tree here to summon the Kumeyaay to what would become a deeply coercive conversion process, a legacy that remains contested.
The Serra Museum, which looks like a Spanish mission but was actually built in 1929, stands near where the original fort stood. From this vantage point you can see the geography that made San Diego valuable to the Spanish: a protected bay, a navigable river, and a mild climate that promised agricultural productivity. The Presidio was the military anchor of California's earliest colonial era, and its location here set the template for the entire California mission chain.