While Route 66 is probably the most famous highway in America, here in the Foothills it connects remnants of an earlier thoroughfare that has been likewise celebrated in song, books and theater: the El Camino Real, or King’s Road, connecting the old Spanish missions.

Yet for many Southern Californians, the El Camino Real’s path from San Juan Capistrano to Los Angeles poses a mystery: Why is it here?

Missions and water

San Diego and then moved north to San Juan Capistrano. The original intent of the Spanish mission system in California was to protect Spain’s exploitation of the mineral wealth of Northern Mexico.

Junípero Serra was a Spanish Franciscan friar who founded missions in California from San Diego to San Francisco, which at the time were in Alta California in the Province of Las Californias in New Spain.

Pope Francis in September canonized Serra, a Spanish States soil.

Turning east

After Serra founded San Juan Capistrano, his party turned inland through today’s Cucamonga and Pomona valleys before he established the Mission San Gabriel.

The most plausible answer for Serra’s change in direction is fresh water. The missions’ required abundant water and lumber – and, controversially today, native people for the religious and labor goals of the missions.

In the days of Serra, the Santa Ana River was the only river Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountain ranges provided rich sources of timber.

Traveling the Mother Road

The original El Camino Real wasn’t a single trail, but a series of horse paths that shifted north or south according to the availability of water and the ability for livestock to travel on hard, dry ground.

But by the beginning of the 20th century, enough remained that the state stitched together known components of the trail to The famous guideposts displaying a mission bell suspended from a Shepard’s hook began appearing in 1906, and by the 1920s, the route in the Foothills provided long stretches of existing roads to be woven into ‘the Mother Road’ - Route 66.