Along Highway 101 between Los Angeles and the Bay Area, cast metal bells spaced one or two miles apart mark what is supposedly a historic route through California: El Camino Real. Variously translated as "the royal road," or, more freely, "the king's highway," El Camino Real was indeed among the state's first long-distance, paved highways. But the road's claim to a more ancient distinction is less certain. In fact, the message implied by the presence of the mission bells – that motorists' tires trace the same path as the missionaries' sandals – is largely a myth imagined by regional boosters and early automotive tourists. According to Nathan Masters, host and executive producer of Lost L.A., regional boosters saw California's missions – many of them long-neglected and crumbling into ruin – as a place where tourists could commune with California's romantic past from the comfort of their modern machines. To clothe El Camino Real with mythic significance, they invented sentimental stories about Franciscan fathers traveling along the road from mission to mission, which were supposedly spaced one day apart along the trail. "El Camino Real was a product of the same impulse that gave us the Spanish Colonial Revival in architecture – imparting an exotic hue to the region as a way to attract more tourists and settlers,” explains Matthew Roth of the Automobile Club of Southern California Archives. Between 1906 and 1914, 400 roadside markers were placed along an approximation of the original footpath.
If you ever find yourself on Cahuenga Boulevard, you can see one of these bells at the entrance of El Paseo de Cahuenga Park, which is situated by a bus stop just after Starbucks. On the other side of Highway 101, Hogwarts Castle, a small-scale simulacrum of an actual castle, sits dormant while Universal Studios Hollywood remains closed. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park is itself a copy of a copy. It pretends to copy the books when in reality, it is merely copying the sets and props from the films that unfaithfully copied the books in the first place; things are rarely as they seem in the land of immersive make-believe. Los Angeles, the spiritual home of fairytales, is full of castles; or at least movie-set-formed notions of how a castle ought to look. It’s a city that has been (re)inventing itself from the beginning: palm trees were imported to match the fantasy image that was being sold to lure people in. Unbeknownst to most, the state of California was named after Calafia, a fictional queen who ruled over a mythic all-female island thought to be a terrestrial paradise like the Garden of Eden or Atlantis. In 1530, when Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived on what is now known as Baja California, separated from the rest of Mexico by the Sea of Cortez, he named the land “California”, after the name of Calafia’s island in Las sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián), a 1510 chivalric novel series written by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. Once the name started being used on maps, it stuck.