Many California cities grew up around a Spanish mission, so visitors often expect one in San Jose. The city instead began as a pueblo, a farming town for settlers. The nearest mission, Mission Santa Clara de Asís, was founded earlier in 1777 about three miles from the original pueblo site, in what is now the city of Santa Clara.
Mission San José came twenty years later, in 1797, about 20 miles north of San Jose in what is now Fremont. San Jose’s own historic church is the Cathedral Basilica of St. Joseph downtown, whose first building, from 1803, was a parish for the town’s settlers rather than a mission.