Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcalá

This guide to Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcala in San Diego opens with a startling fact: most of the gleaming white facade in front of you is barely a century old. You'll hear how the mission complex collapsed into ruin after Mexico shut the missions down in eighteen thirty-four, its roof tiles stripped for houses across town and cavalry troops later stabling horses inside what remained. It follows the decades-long fundraising effort and the eventual nineteen thirty-one reconstruction, which folded surviving fragments of the original adobe into the new walls. Listen for the bells above you, five of them gathered from across the grounds and rehung.