San Blas

History

Nuño de Guzmán colonized this stretch of coast between 1529 and 1531, and tradition credits him with the first port here. San Blas as we know it dates from 1768, when the royal inspector José de Gálvez set up a naval department and shipyard to supply and defend Sonora, the Californias and the far north. That same year Junípero Serra and his Franciscans sailed from here toward the California missions.

From San Blas, Juan Pérez sailed in 1774 to become the first Spaniard to sight Nootka Sound, and Bruno de Heceta and Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra followed in 1775, charting the coasts of today's Oregon and Washington. Navy ships carried mail to Manila, and a naval hospital opened in 1770 that grew to a hundred beds and treated the hardest cases from the northern presidios. The port was never easy: the harbor was small and silted up, and mosquitoes and fevers were constant. Nearby hardwood forests, though, kept the shipyard supplied.

In December 1810 the insurgent priest José María Mercado took the port; after a royalist uprising he died falling into a ravine below the Contaduría. The bells of the ruined hilltop church are said to have inspired Longfellow's poem The Bells of San Blas. San Blas was named a Pueblo Mágico in 2023.