Cadegomo

Cadegomo lies in a desert valley of the Baja California peninsula, where springs and an intermittent watercourse support an oasis among dry mountains. The place was inhabited by Indigenous people before Spanish missionaries established a settlement there. Its water and cultivable ground made it valuable to the missions that spread through the peninsula in the eighteenth century.

In 1685 Isidro de Atondo y Antillón and the missionary Eusebio Francisco Kino explored this region during an early Spanish expedition. The Jesuit Nicolás Tamaral founded the mission of La Purísima Concepción de Cadegomó in 1720. Like other missions of the peninsula, it sought to gather Indigenous families around a church and cultivated lands, while relying on supplies brought from across the Gulf of California.