Portolá Trail Campsite (1)

On August 2, 1769 the Portolá expedition came down through low hills and camped near a river running between cottonwoods and alders. Fray Juan Crespí named it the Porciúncula for the feast day, and the party felt three earthquakes that afternoon and night — a week earlier he had named the Santa Ana the river of the earthquakes. Sixty-odd men were walking to Monterey and would fail to recognize it when they got there. The pueblo came twelve years later, on ground the Tongva had held far longer.

What the plaque says

Spanish colonization of California began in 1769 with the expedition of Don Gaspar de Portolá from Mexico. With Captain Don Fernando Rivera y Moncada, Lieutenant Don Pedro Fages, Sgt. José Francisco Ortega, and Fathers Juan Crespí and Francisco Gómez, he and his party camped near this spot on August 2, 1769, en route to Monterey.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chavez Ravine — 0.7 mi
  Three Mexican American neighborhoods cleared for public housing that was never built, then traded to a ballclub.
• Colorado Street Bridge — 6.3 mi
  Beaux-Arts concrete arches curving 150 feet above the Arroyo Seco, opened in 1913 and later a link in Route 66.
• Mission San Gabriel Arcangel — 7.1 mi
  The fourth Alta California mission, built on Tongva land with Tongva labor, rebuilt after arson and now telling that story straight.
• Campo de Cahuenga — 9.0 mi
  The treaty that ended the fighting in California was signed on this ground, and the building it was signed in is now under the boulevard.

More markers nearby

• First Jewish Site in Los Angeles — 0.8 mi
• Navy and Marine Corps Reserve Center — 0.9 mi
• Avila Adobe — 1.2 mi
• Los Angeles Plaza — 1.2 mi