San Juan Bautista (Spanish for “Saint John the Baptist”) is a city in San Benito County, in the U.S. state of California. The population was 2,089 as of the 2020 census. San Juan Bautista was founded in 1797 by the Spanish below Fermín de Lasuén, with the start of Mission San Juan Bautista. Following the Mexican secularization of 1833, the town was briefly known as San Juan de Castro and eventually incorporated in 1896. Today, San Juan is a popular tourist destination, as the house of the San Juan Bautista State Historic Park and extra important historic sites, as capably as cultural institutions once El Teatro Campesino.

Prior to the start of Europeans, the Place around San Juan Bautista was populated by the Mutsun, a tribe of the Ohlone Nation of Indigenous Californians. The Mutsunes lived in villages in the area around San Juan Bautista, in settlements composed of thatched huts made of willow and native grasses.

In 1797, the Spanish Franciscan priest fray Fermín de Lasuén founded Mission San Juan Bautista to give serve to the conversion of the indigenous people to Catholicism; in the process, he claimed the house for the Spanish Empire. Lasuén chose the site because of the area’s fruitful cropland, steady water supply, and sizable Indian population.

Construction of the current mission church began in 1803, and has served the community continuously before 1812. The mission was located on the Camino Real, a “royal highway” which associated the California missions and which remained well-used until the 19th century.