There’s this moment when you roll up to San Juan Bautista, mission número fifteen in the chain, if anyone’s counting, which they shouldn’t be, and the whole place just hits differently. Not in some postcarded up, sanitized heritage way, but like walking into a room where ghosts still pay rent.
The thing squats on a fault line, literally. The San Andreas runs right underneath it, this tectonic middle finger that’s been threatening to swallow everything whole since 1797. They built it anyway. You gotta respect that kind of obstinate faith, or delusion, or whatever kept those stone walls going up while the ground rolled like ocean swells beneath them.
Inside, the paint peels in strips that look like scripture written in decay. The old timbers groan with stories they’ll never tell cleanly: too much blood in the floorboards, too many languages gone silent in the corridors. This wasn’t some spiritual Disneyland. This was the real machinery of empire grinding against indigenous reality, leaving residue that no amount of restoration can buff away.
Hitchcock shot Vertigo here because he understood: San Juan Bautista doesn’t need embellishment. The vertigo’s built in. The past doesn’t rest here. It prowls, restless and unresolved, while tour groups shuffle past missing everything that matters.