Misión El Descanso

El Descanso is a village of about 490 people in the valley of the same name, at the southern end of Playas de Rosarito municipality. A creek runs down the valley and pools into a small estuary before reaching the sea, just south of the Cantamar dunes, and on its north bank lie the remains of the municipality's only mission, the second-to-last the Dominicans founded on the peninsula.

Floods started it. The Río Guadalupe kept washing out the fields of Mission San Miguel, at today's La Misión, so around 1809-1810 Fray Tomás de Ahumada moved to higher ground some 13 km north, above the creek and in sight of the ocean. That first site, San Miguel la Nueva, is now the cemetery on top of the valley's south ridge. In 1830 Fray Félix Caballero built an adobe church about 600 meters north, across the creek, and the two were run as one mission. Wheat, barley and maize grew here, with orchards and a reservoir up the valley, and sea otter pelts, salt and tallow went out by ship. After the secularization decree the mission closed in 1834 with 254 residents, and Caballero moved inland to found Guadalupe. By 1853 it was deserted.

What survives is modest but unusual: foundations and low runs of adobe wall nearly a meter thick, made with pebbles and crushed shell instead of straw, unlike any other mission in the region. A 1997 dig exposed them, and a temporary steel roof keeps the rain off. Beside them stands the Mission Revival chapel of San Miguel Arcángel, built on the 1830 site. Every November 2 neighbors build a large community Day of the Dead altar here, with Mass, dancing, piñatas and a shared supper of tamales, champurrado and buñuelos.