Junípero Serra

Junípero Serra founded the first Spanish missions in California and is both a canonised saint and, for many Native Californians, the author of a catastrophe. He was a Mallorcan Franciscan and a professor of theology who gave up a comfortable academic career at thirty-five to be a missionary in Mexico. He walked from Veracruz to Mexico City on arrival and injured a leg that troubled him for the rest of his life. In 1769 he went north with the Portolá expedition and founded San Diego, then eight more missions from there to San Francisco. The mission system baptised Native Californians and then held them: converts were not free to leave, were made to labour, and were flogged for absconding, and Serra defended corporal punishment in writing as a father's correction. Disease did the rest. The indigenous population of coastal California fell by something close to ninety per cent over the mission period. He also travelled to Mexico City to obtain a set of regulations protecting the missions' converts from the military, which is genuinely to his credit. Pope Francis canonised him in 2015, in Washington rather than Rome, and the decision was contested at the time; statues of him in California have since been removed or torn down. He died at Carmel in 1784 and is buried there. The missions he founded became the nucleus of most of California's coastal cities, and the state highway that connects them still carries the name El Camino Real. His statue was removed from the United States Capitol's collection in 2025 at California's request.

• Lived: 1713 CE – 1784 CE
• Nationality: Spanish
• Roles: religious_leader