Ensenada Cruisers

Speaking of Discovery, do you know who discovered Ensenada? The cruisers that attended the Ensenada tour last Saturday learned a lot about the city they live in and were given a sneak preview of the future developments and how they will impact Ensenada & Baja California.  Here's a little history tidbit on the man who actually discovered Ensenada over 450 years ago.
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On May 15, 1982, Ensenada celebrated the centennial of its founding. The date was finally acknowledged after a series of controversies which in themselves confirmed how unique the birth of the cities in Baja California Norte had been in comparison to others in Mexico and in Baja California. In Mexico, most of the existing cities were founded by royal decree on the sites of precolumbian dwellings; therefore, a document existed naming each new city officially, and the date was unquestionable. As regards the oldest towns in Baja California, these were founded on the sites of the Jesuit or Dominican missions, and their birth could accurately be traced to the date of the founding of each mission. This would not be the case of the four main existing cities in Baja California Norte: Ensenada, Tijuana, Mexicali and Tecate.

How then did Ensenada become the site for the oldest city in Baja California Norte? Its bay was discovered on September 17, 1542, by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo. He named it San Mateo, stayed for six days and did not report any inhabitants. Sixty years later, when Sebastián Vizcaíno rediscovered it on the Fifth of November 1602, and renamed it Ensenada de Todos Santos,he did not mention any population either. Historians next have documented testimony regarding Ensenada from Father Junípero Serra, who passed through on his way from San Fernando Vellicatá to San Diego in the summer of 1769. He is the first to acknowledge the existence of inhabitants of whom he said:

"There is immense gentility, and all those of this countercoast (of the South Sea) wherefrom we have come, from Ensenada de Todos Santos, for that is what the maps and charts call it, live very leisurely with various seeds and with the fishing that they do in their rafts of reeds in the form of canoes."

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No one knows when these people arrived. We can only surmise that they remained there for some time, and later migrated to the mountains or to the Dominican missions developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Dominican fathers, for some unknown reason, did not favor Ensenada and stayed south in Santo Tomás, and north, in San Miguel. So Ensenada continued to be a solitary and perfect bay with a scimitar valley that softly ascended towards its blue mountains. The land was there for the taking, and Alferez José Manuel Ruiz, a native of Loreto and Commandant of the Frontera Territory (the capital of which was then, San Vicente), solicited the property of Ensenada in 1804 from the Governor, José Joaquín Arrillaga. It was granted to him in 1806 at a price of two pesos. The grant totalled more than 3500 hectares, and Ruiz used it only for grazing. In 1824, two years after he had moved to Loreto as Political and Military Head of Government, he sold the property to his son-in-law, Francisco Gastelum for $600 pesos.⁴ Gastelum and his descendants thus became the first non-aboriginal inhabitants of Ensenada.

Information obtained from 

The Journal of San Diego History
SAN DIEGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY QUARTERLY
Winter 1984, Volume 30, Number 1
Written by by Maria Eugenia Bonifaz de Novelo