Junípero Serra Museum

The guide to the Junipero Serra Museum in San Diego begins in 1769, when this hilltop held California's first European fort, built and worked by Spanish soldiers, Franciscan missionaries and Kumeyaay laborers before it was abandoned by 1837 and left to erode for nearly a century. It then turns to the Great Depression, when Works Progress Administration crews of unemployed San Diegans reshaped the bare hilltop into the park around you, cutting roads, gutters and drainage lines and troweling the stucco inside the museum itself. You'll hear how their labor, done simply for a paycheck, brought the outline of the old presidio walls back into view. Look for the grass-covered mounds near the parking lot that mark where those walls once stood.