San Rafael
Even in this land, so prodigal with its flowers from its northern to its southern borders, San Rafael, the county-seat of Marin County, fifteen miles north of San Francisco, is notable for the exceeding beauty of its gardens, where the lily and the rose bloom from year’s end to year’s end.
Its patron, St. Raphael, “is considered the guardian angel of humanity. He was the herald who bore to the shepherds the ‘good tidings of great joy which shall be for all people’, and is especially the protector of the young, the pilgrim and the traveler.” The “herald of great joy” seems peculiarly fitting as the protector of a place where nature has done so much for the “joy of living.”
The mission of San Rafael Arcángel (St. Raphael the Archangel), founded in 1817, has now disappeared, not a vestige remaining of it.
A spur of the Coast Range in Southern California bears the name of the San Rafael Mountains.