Your gaze falls on the oldest intact building in San Francisco, a structure whose walls have witnessed the entire span of the city's history. Mission San Francisco de Asís — called Mission Dolores after the nearby creek — was founded on June 29, 1776, just five days before the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia. The mission was the sixth in a chain of 21 missions the Franciscan friar Junípero Serra established along the California coast, each a day's walk apart, connected by the road called El Camino Real.
The adobe church you see was completed in 1791 with walls four feet thick, and it is the only building in San Francisco to have survived the 1906 earthquake and fire without significant damage — its thick adobe construction absorbed the shaking that destroyed the wooden structures around it. The mission was built with the forced labor of the Ohlone and Coast Miwok peoples, who were baptized, brought within the mission system, and put to work. Within a generation of the missions' founding, the indigenous population of coastal California had declined by approximately 90 percent from introduced diseases, displacement, and the disruptions of the mission system.
The cemetery beside the church holds the remains of more than 5,000 indigenous people along with the early Spanish and Mexican settlers. Hitchcock filmed scenes for Vertigo at this cemetery in 1957.