Saints, Sinners, and Sunsets

Creating a New 250-Year Old Path Between California’s Spanish Missions

Learn about the California Missions Trail, an 800-mile itinerary with visions of becoming an American version of the Camino De Santiago.

The California Missions Trail was first a footpath connecting Native American communities, then an itinerary for missionaries among its 21 Spanish Missions (1769-1821), then a romanticized highway development project called “El Camino Real.” Now it is an 800-mile itinerary with visions of becoming an American version of the Camino De Santiago. Creating the itinerary and writing its first professionally produced guidebook meant reassessing California’s colonial legacy and reinterpreting it for a new day. Presenters are Mark Wilkinson of the Santa Barbara Country Trails Council and Sanford “Sandy” Brown, author of popular pilgrimage trekking guidebooks and Associate Publisher of UK’s Cicerone Press.

Learning Objectives:

• Hear details about the painful legacy of colonialism in California and how it affects Native American communities;
• Hear about how organizers created a culturally sensitive guidebook resource that reinterprets a romanticized version of colonial history by incorporating Native American guidance and academic research; and
• Learn marketing strategies for dealing with the diverse communities crossed by an 800-mile itinerary that includes sweeping open country and densely urbanized cityscapes.