Mission San Miguel Arcángel, Spanish mission in San Miguel, San Luis Obispo County, United States
Mission San Miguel Arcángel is a Spanish colonial church in San Miguel, California, built between 1816 and 1818 with adobe bricks and walls several feet thick. The compound includes the church as well as a museum, priests' quarters, and a cemetery, all arranged around an open courtyard.
Father Fermín Lasuén founded this station in 1797 as the sixteenth in the chain of California missions, meant to secure the connection between the northern and southern outposts. An earthquake in 2003 damaged the buildings heavily, leading to extensive restoration work that closed the site to visitors for many years.
The wall paintings inside the church are the original work of Esteban Munras and Salinan artists. Munras was not from Catalonia; the sources name him only as the designer of the murals. The paintings cover the church walls, and the sources do not describe ceiling paintings or claim the colors are unchanged.
The church stands in the town of San Miguel, in San Luis Obispo County, between Mission San Luis Obispo and Mission San Antonio de Padua. The Rios-Caledonia Adobe, built in 1835 as the overseer's house, lies just south; its grounds are kept by San Luis Obispo County Parks with picnic sites and restrooms. The mission church closed after the December 2003 San Simeon earthquake and reopened in 2009.
The church interior preserves its original wall paintings, which have never been painted over or renewed, unlike most other missions along the California coast. The burial registry records over 2,200 names with remarkable detail about the age, origin, and cause of death of those interred.
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