Spanish Discovery & The Mexican Rancho Era

European contact began on September 28, 1542, when Portuguese navigator Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo dropped anchor inside Point Loma aboard the San Salvador, providing the first written notation of the low eastern sandspit. Sixty years later, in November 1602, General Sebastián Vizcaíno conducted the first systematic hydrographic survey of the harbor, officially naming Los Coronados after the Four Crowned Martyrs and christening San Diego Bay.

Under Spanish and Mexican governance, the peninsula remained wild and uncultivated, referred to simply as the Peninsula de San Diego. On May 15, 1846, in the final weeks of Mexican authority before the outbreak of the Mexican-American War, Governor Pío Pico granted the 4,185-acre peninsula to Don Pedro Carrillo as a wedding gift upon his marriage to Josefa Bandini.

Carrillo held the isolated land grant for just seven months before selling the entire property to American merchant captain Bezer Simmons for $1,000 in silver. Simmons’ untimely death in 1850 sparked decades of probate litigation, preserving the peninsula in its pristine, undeveloped state throughout the California Gold Rush era.