Moraga Adobe

The Moraga Adobe, sometimes called the Joaquin Moraga Adobe, stands at 24 Adobe Lane in the city of Orinda, in the rolling hills of central Contra Costa County. The building dates from the early 1840s and is the oldest surviving structure in the county. It was built by Joaquin Moraga, grandson of Lieutenant Jose Joaquin Moraga, the Spanish officer who in 1776 had led the founding expedition to San Francisco and the establishment of the presidio. The younger Joaquin Moraga received the Rancho Laguna de los Palos Colorados land grant in 1835, jointly with his cousin Juan Bernal, and built the present adobe as the ranch headquarters.

Architecturally the building is a vernacular single-story rancho adobe with later modifications. The walls were laid up from sun-dried adobe brick produced on site and set on a low stone foundation. The exterior was finished with lime plaster, and the roof was framed in hand-hewn timber and originally finished with hand-split shakes; the long covered porch along the principal elevation followed the standard Northern California rancho pattern. Subsequent owners enlarged and altered the building during the second half of the nineteenth century, but the principal adobe walls and plan have been documented through the Historic American Buildings Survey and subsequent preservation studies.

The adobe was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 under reference 72000223. The building was the subject of a long-running preservation and litigation effort in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as the surrounding ranch lands were developed for housing, and the structure itself was eventually placed under preservation easement.

The property is held privately, with the adobe maintained as a protected resource within the surrounding residential subdivision. Within the broader California adobe tradition, the Moraga Adobe is one of the principal surviving rancho headquarters of the East Bay, documenting the Hispanic-Californio rural landscape that occupied the inland valleys of the San Francisco Bay region in the period between Mexican independence and American statehood.