EL CAMINO REAL (CALIFORNIA)

'El Camino Real' (Spanish for 'The Royal Road', also known as 'The King's Highway') usually refers to the 600-mile (966-kilometer) ''California Mission Trail'', connecting the former Alta California's 21 missions (along with a number of support sites), 4 presidios, and several pueblos, stretching from Mission San Diego de Alcalá in San Diego in the south to Mission San Francisco Solano in Sonoma in the north.
In fact, any road under the direct jurisdiction of the Spanish crown and its viceroys was a "camino real". Examples of such roads ran between principal settlements throughout Spain and its colonies such as New Spain. Most ''caminos reales'' had names apart from the appended "camino real". Once Mexico won its independence from Spain, no road in Mexico, including California, was any longer a ''camino real''. The name was rarely used after that and was only revived in the American period in connection with the boosterism associated with the Mission Revival movement of the early 20th century.
The route originated near the southernmost tip of Baja California Sur in Mexico, at the site of Misión San Bruno in San Bruno (the first mission established in Las Californias), though it was only maintained as far south as Loreto.

Contents

History

The road today

El Camino Real on the San Francisco Peninsula

El Camino Real in Southern California

Bells

Miscellany

Historic designations

Notes

References

See also

External links

History

Between 1683 and 1834, Spanish missionaries established a series of religious outposts throughout the present-day U.S. State of California and the present-day Mexican states of Baja California and Baja California Sur. In order to facilitate overland travel, the mission settlements were situated approximately 30 miles (48 kilometers) apart, so that they were separated by one day's long ride on horseback along the 600-mile (966-kilometer) long El Camino Real (Spanish for "The Royal Highway," though often referred to in the later Anglo American embellished translation, "The King's Highway"), and also known as the ''California Mission Trail''. (The actual Spanish expression for "King's Highway" is "carretera del rey".) Heavy freight movement was practical only via water. Tradition has it that the padres sprinkled mustard seeds along the trail in order to mark it with bright yellow flowers.
In 1912, the State of California began paving a section of the historic route in San Mateo County. Construction of a two-lane concrete highway began in front of the historic Uncle Tom's Cabin, an inn in San Bruno that was built in 1849 and demolished exactly 100 years later. There was little traffic initially and local children used the pavement for roller skating until traffic increased. By the late 1920s, the State of California began the first of numerous widening projects of what later became part of U.S. Highway 101; today the route through San Mateo and Santa Clara counties is designated as California Highway 82.^[1]

The road today

Today, several modern highways cover parts of the historic route, though large sections are on city streets (for instance, most of the stretch between San Jose and San Francisco). Its full modern route, as defined by the California State Legislature, is as follows:^[2][3]

★ Interstate 5, U.S.-Mexico border to Anaheim

★ Anaheim Boulevard, Harbor Boulevard, State Route 72 and Whittier Boulevard, Anaheim to Los Angeles

★ U.S. Route 101, Los Angeles to San Jose

★ State Route 82, San Jose to San Francisco

★ Interstate 280, San Francisco

★ U.S. Route 101, San Francisco to Novato

★ State Route 37, Novato to Sears Point

★ State Route 121, Sears Point to Sonoma

★ State Route 12, Sonoma
;East Bay route

★ State Route 87, Pass through Santa Clara County and Alameda County.

★ State Route 92?

★ State Route 238, ? to Hayward

★ State Route 185, Hayward to Oakland

★ State Route 123, Oakland to San Pablo (continued to Martinez)

★ State Route 162?
Some older local roads that parallel these routes also have the name.
Many streets throughout California today bear the name of this famous road, often with little factual relation to the original.
A surviving, unpaved stretch of the road has been preserved next to the old Spanish mission in San Juan Bautista; this road actually follows part of the San Andreas Fault and still has some of the old wagon ruts.

El Camino Real on the San Francisco Peninsula

The iconic status of El Camino Real on the San Francisco Peninsula (where it is signed as Route 82, and sometimes simply called ''El Camino'') is such that navigation is usually done relative to it, and it defines logical north and south in the area. In the mid-Peninsula, it runs almost directly north-south; in the Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area, it runs almost directly east-west. Additionally, the name of the road changes in the middle and on the boundaries of most of the many Peninsula cities between north, south, east, west, and (plain) El Camino, and its street numbers reset (often to 100) as it enters each new city.
El Camino Real is the centermost of the four transit corridors that run the length of the peninsula, namely Interstate 280, El Camino Real, the Caltrain tracks, and U.S. Highway 101. El Camino runs past Stanford University, Santa Clara University and through downtown San Jose where it is named Santa Clara Street.

El Camino Real in Southern California

In Southern California, the road follows Harbor Boulevard in Orange County, Whittier Boulevard/Route 72, Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, the Cahuenga Pass, and Ventura Boulevard. San Francisco's Mission Street continues the route, connecting what is now California State Route 82 to Mission San Francisco de Asís (Mission Dolores).

Bells

Modern El Camino Real was one of the first state highways in California. Given the lack of standardized road signs at the time, it was decided to place distinctive bells along the route, hung on supports in the form of an 11-foot high shepherd's crook, also described as "a Franciscan walking stick." The first of 450 bells was unveiled on August 15, 1906 at the Plaza Church in the Pueblo near Olvera Street in Los Angeles.
The original organization which installed the bells fragmented, and the Automobile Club of Southern California and associated groups cared for the bells from the mid-1920s through 1931. The State took over bell maintenance in 1933. Most of the bells eventually disappeared due to vandalism, theft or simple loss due to the relocation or rerouting of highways and roads. After a reduction in the number of bells to around 150, the State began replacing them, at first with concrete, and later with iron. A design first produced in 1960 by Justin Kramer of Los Angeles was the standard until the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) began a restoration effort in 1996.
Keith Robinson, Principal Landscape Architect at Caltrans developed an El Camino Real restoration program which resulted in the installation of 555 El Camino Real Bell Markers in 2005. The Bell Marker consists of a 460 mm diameter cast metal bell set atop a 75 mm diameter Schedule 40 pipe column that is attached to a concrete foundation using anchor rods. The original 1906 bell molds were used to fabricate the replacement bells. The replacement and original bells were produced by the California Bell Company, are dated ''1769 to 1906'', and include a designer's copyright notice.

Miscellany

'El Camino Real' is the subject of a bilingual pun among Stanford University computer scientists. From the Jargon File^[4]:
:In the FORTRAN language, a 'real' is a number typically precise to seven significant figures, and a 'double precision' quantity is a larger floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant digits (other languages have similar 'real' types). When a hacker from MIT, Guy L. Steele, visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a long road El Camino Real was. Making a bilingual pun on 'real', he started calling it 'El Camino Double Precision'.
:When he was told that the road was hundreds of miles long (resulting in extremely large street address numbers), he renamed it 'El Camino Bignum' ["bignum" is LISP jargon for an indefinite-precision integer], and that name has stuck.
:In the early 1990s, the synonym "El Camino Virtual" has been reported as an alternate at IBM and Amdahl sites in Silicon Valley. Mathematically literate hackers in the Valley have also been heard to refer to some major cross-street intersecting El Camino Real as "El Camino Imaginary" (referring to the complex plane). One popular theory is that the intersection is located near Moffett Field — where they keep all those complex planes.
A common language faux pas is to call the road "The El Camino", which literally translates to "The The Road".

Historic designations

★ California Historical Landmark #784 — El Camino Real ("''as Father Serra knew it and helped blaze it''" — the segment extending from Mission San Diego de Alcalá to Mission San Francisco de Asís)

Notes

1. San Mateo County Historical Society, ''San Bruno Herald''
2.
3. California Highways: El Camino Real
4.

References

★ California's Spanish Missions: Their Yesterdays and Todays, Crump, S., , , Trans-Anglo Books, Del Mar, CA, 1975, ISBN 0-87046-028-5

★ The California Missions, Johnson, P., ed., , , Lane Book Company, Menlo Park, CA, 1964,

★ California's Missions, Wright, R., , , Hubert A. and Martha H. Lowman, Arroyo Grande, CA, 1950,

See also

★ El Camino Real

★ History of California

★ Spanish missions in California

★ Spanish missions in Baja California

External links

★ Caltrans: El Camino Real Mission Bell Marker Project

★ El Camino Bignum (Jargon file entry)

★ Grand Boulevard Initiative