Old Town

San Diego's Spanish and Mexican roots are most evident in Old Town, the area north of downtown at Juan Street, near the intersection of Interstates 5 and 8. As the first European settlement in Southern California, Old Town San Diego's first houses, of sun-dried adobe bricks arranged around a central plaza, began to appear in the 1820s; by the 1850s, after the discovery of gold drew prospectors to California from around the globe, they began to be replaced with wood-frame structures. In the 1860s, however, the advent of Alonzo Horton's New Town to the southeast stole thunder from Old Town, which began to wither. Efforts to preserve it began early in the 20th century, and when it became a state historic park in 1968 the process of restoration gained momentum.

Although Old Town was largely a 19th-century phenomenon, the pueblo's true beginnings took place much earlier and on a hill overlooking it, where soldiers from New Spain established a military outpost in May 1769 and two months later Father Junípero Serra established the first of California's missions, San Diego de Alcalá. The missionaries forced San Diego's original inhabitants, the Kumeyaay Indians—called the Diegueños by the Spaniards—to abandon their seminomadic lifestyle and live at the mission; they also expected the Indians to adopt Spanish customs and Christianity as their religion, although the Indians resisted fiercely.

In 1774 the hilltop was declared a Royal Presidio, or fortress, and the mission was moved 6 mi west to a new site along the San Diego River. The Kumeyaays, responding to the loss of more of their land, attacked and burned it in 1775. Their revolt was short-lived, however. A later assault on the presidio was less successful, and by 1800 about 1,500 Kumeyaays were living on the mission's grounds, receiving religious instruction and adapting to Spanish ways.

When Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, the new nation claimed Spanish lands in California and flew the Mexican flag over the presidio. The Mexican government, centered some 2,000 mi away in Monterrey, stripped the missions of their lands, and an aristocracy of landholders began to emerge. At the same time, settlers began to move down from the presidio to what is now Old Town.

A rectangular plaza was laid out along today's San Diego Avenue to serve as the settlement's center. In 1846, during the war between Mexico and the United States, a detachment of U.S. Marines raised the Stars and Stripes over the plaza for the first time. The flag was removed once or twice, but by early 1848 Mexico had surrendered California, and the U.S. flag remained. San Diego became an incorporated city in 1850, with Old Town as its center.

On San Diego Avenue, the district's main drag, art galleries and expensive gift shops are interspersed with tacky curio shops, restaurants, and open-air stands selling inexpensive Mexican pottery, jewelry, and blankets. The Old Town Esplanade on San Diego Avenue between Harney and Conde streets is the best of several mall-like affairs constructed in mock Mexican-plaza style. Shops and restaurants also line Juan and Congress streets.

Access to Old Town is easy thanks to the nearby Transit Center. Ten bus lines stop here, as do the San Diego Trolley and the Coaster commuter rail line. Two large parking lots linked to the park by an underground pedestrian walkway ease some of the parking congestion, and signage leading from I-8 to the Transit Center is easy to follow.