Walk through Old Town San Diego, and you will quickly encounter one of the city’s most famous historic buildings: La Casa de Estudillo. For generations, visitors knew it by another name — “Ramona’s Marriage Place.”
The title sounds like a piece of local history. In reality, it is one of San Diego’s most successful examples of how literature, tourism, and preservation became intertwined.
The building itself is very real. Constructed between 1827 and 1829 by José María Estudillo and his son José Antonio Estudillo, La Casa de Estudillo became one of the most important homes in early San Diego. During the Mexican period, it served as a social and community center, hosting gatherings, celebrations, meetings, and even religious activities before a permanent chapel was established nearby.
Today, it is considered one of the finest surviving examples of a large Mexican-era adobe townhouse in California.
The connection to Ramona came decades later.
The book that helped
In 1884, author Helen Hunt Jackson published Ramona, a novel set in Southern California. Although the book was fiction, it became a national bestseller and sparked widespread interest in California’s Spanish and Mexican past…