On the last Sunday of every spring, a girl in a velvet cape and a borrowed crown walks the few blocks up Avenida de Portugal to St. Agnes Catholic Church, and half of Point Loma walks behind her. Inside the United Portuguese hall afterward, the sopas come out in great steaming tureens, beef and cabbage over slices of sweetened bread, ladled free to anyone who shows up hungry. It is the oldest ethnic festival in San Diego, older than the navy base, older than the highway. And it is the last living thread of an empire that once made this peninsula the tuna capital of the world.
The Portuguese in Point Loma did not just fish here. They built the high-seas tuna fleet of the United States, skippered the boats that fed the canneries, and named the streets after the country they left. The boats are mostly gone now. The festa is not.
Point Loma: The Place
Point Loma is a long hilly peninsula that curls around the western edge of San Diego Bay, separating the harbor from the open Pacific. The old Portuguese heart of it sits on the bay side, in the low waterfront neighborhoods of La Playa and Roseville, climbing up into Fleetridge. Rosecrans Street is the spine, running from the freeway down toward Shelter Island and the boat basins. The housing is a mix of modest postwar cottages and, closer to the water, the larger homes that tuna money built.
How Point Loma Became Tunaville
Before the Portuguese
The first European to see this coast may himself have been Portuguese. Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sailed into San Diego Bay on September 28, 1542, the first European known to land on what is now the West Coast of the United States, and he came ashore at Point Loma. For centuries he was claimed as a son of Portugal, and a monument to him still crowns the peninsula’s southern tip. Documents surfacing from a 1532 lawsuit have since muddied that story, and many historians now read him as Spanish, so the neat full circle is more legend than proven fact.
What is certain is that Portuguese islanders were working these waters long before the tuna boats. Azorean whalers reached California in the mid-1800s, hunting gray whales from open boats off the coast. By the 1870s, families from the Azores were settling along the San Diego waterfront, drawn by the bay, the climate, and the fish.
The Portuguese Arrive
The newcomers came from two clusters of Atlantic islands. The earliest wave sailed from the Azores, above all from Pico and Faial, beginning in the 1870s. A second stream followed from Madeira, and in particular from one small cliff-backed fishing village, Paul do Mar, whose men heard about the lobster and fish of California and came to chase them.
Almost none of them came straight to San Diego. They landed first in the Portuguese fishing colonies of New England and the mid-Atlantic, in places like the old whaling port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, then worked their way west by rail when word spread of warm water and year-round fishing. Chain migration did the rest. One brother sent for another, a cousin married into a boat, new arrivals lodged with a family already here and pooled their wages to buy a share in a vessel.
They clustered first in La Playa, hard against the bay, then spread up into Roseville. The whole district picked up a nickname that stuck for a century: Tunaville. Surnames got quietly anglicized along the way, Oliveira to Oliver, Rodrigues to Rogers, Machado to Marshall, partly to be understood and partly to avoid being mistaken for the city’s Mexican population.
Point Loma at Its Peak
The man who changed everything was Manuel Oliver Medina, who arrived in 1912 with almost nothing and went on to pioneer America’s high-seas tuna fleet. He was among the first to build ocean-ranging tuna clippers, the first to fit them with refrigerated holds, radio, and radar, vessels that could steam south to Mexico and Central America and stay out for months. Seven Medina brothers ended up skippering their own boats. They were not alone. The Freitas, Madruga, Correia, and Rosa families all put captains on the water, and the fishermen organized early, founding the American Tunaboat Association in San Diego in 1917.
For decades the catch came in on bait boats, where men stood at the rail with bamboo poles and live anchovy, hauling hundred-pound tuna over their shoulders three poles to a fish. Then the technology turned. By the late 1950s the great purse seiners arrived, hauling huge nets with hydraulic power and spotting schools from helicopters, scooping up tons at a time where poles had once taken them one by one.
At its height, from the 1950s into the early 1970s, San Diego’s fleet ran to roughly two hundred vessels, nearly half of them Portuguese-owned, and the port handled the lion’s share of the world’s canned tuna. Ten canneries lined the waterfront, where many of the fishermen’s wives cleaned and packed the catch. The money was real and so was the pride. Wedding receptions filled the Hotel del Coronado, and at Christmas the fishermen strung their boats with lights and paraded them around the bay.
The Change
The fall came fast. Foreign competition drove tuna prices down, fuel and insurance costs climbed, and the price per ton collapsed. The deepest blow was the dolphin. In the eastern Pacific, yellowfin tuna swim beneath dolphin pods, and the purse-seine nets that caught the fish drowned the dolphins by the thousand.
Public pressure and tightening regulation followed, and when the big canners committed to dolphin-safe tuna, the fleet’s old fishing grounds no longer paid. Boats moved to the western Pacific, where tuna and dolphins do not run together, registering and landing in American Samoa and farther afield. The San Diego canneries closed one after another, Van Camp shutting its harbor plant in 1984. A community built on a single industry watched that industry sail away.
The Landmarks of Tunaville
United Portuguese S.E.S. Hall (2818 Avenida de Portugal). In 1920, Captain M. O. Medina saw that the community needed a home for its faith and its feast, and by 1922 the fishermen had built the first Portuguese hall and chapel, each man giving 25 cents per ton of fish toward the cost. The current hall opened in 1948, and Medina presided over the society for some five decades. It remains the beating heart of the festa.
St. Agnes Catholic Church (on Evergreen Street). The fishermen built their first small wooden church here in 1908, blessed that March, because the trip to Old Town for Mass was too far. They replaced it with the present Mediterranean-style church in 1933, again paying for it by the ton of fish landed. Its tower once carried a lit statue of Our Lady of Good Voyage, a beacon meant to guide the boats safely home.
The Festa do Espirito Santo. First celebrated in San Diego in 1910, the Feast of the Holy Spirit is the oldest ethnic festival in the city, and it still runs every spring. It honors Queen Saint Isabel of Portugal, who legend says fed her starving people in a time of famine, and that charity survives in the free sopas served to all comers and the crowning of a festa queen.
The Portuguese Historical Center (2831 Avenida de Portugal). Founded in 1977 by Basilio Freitas and others, the center occupies a cottage near the hall and keeps the photographs, ship models, and family records of Tunaville. It is the institutional memory of a neighborhood whose working fleet has nearly vanished.
The Tunaman’s Memorial (Shelter Island). Dedicated on October 26, 1986, this bronze by Franco Vianello, himself a commercial fisherman, shows three men hauling a breaching tuna on a pole rig. The three figures stand for the Portuguese, Italian, and Japanese fishermen who shared the bay. Its inscription remembers those who left this harbor and did not return.
Cabrillo National Monument (Point Loma’s southern tip). Established in 1913 and now drawing visitors to the cliffs above the bay, it marks the 1542 landing and the explorer long claimed as Portuguese. Whatever the truth of Cabrillo’s birth, the monument gave the community a powerful origin story to point to.
Where the Point Loma Portuguese Came From
Two island groups in the Atlantic supplied almost the entire community. The Azores came first, and above all the central islands of Pico and Faial, volcanic outcrops with deep whaling and fishing traditions and little farmland to keep their sons home. Madeira followed, sending fishermen from the steep village of Paul do Mar, where men had worked open boats for generations before they ever heard of California.
They left for the oldest reason: there was not enough at home and there was opportunity across the water. Skills transferred almost perfectly. Men who had hand-lined off basalt cliffs in the Azores could read San Diego’s bait and weather within a season, and the kinship networks that bound the islands bound the boats. The same instincts carried other Portuguese fishing families to Little Portugal in San Jose and up and down the California coast.
Point Loma Today
The working fleet is essentially a memory. A handful of families still own boats that fish foreign waters, and a few local captains still ship out to the western Pacific, but the canneries are gone and the waterfront has turned to marinas, yacht clubs, and restaurants. Roseville real estate now sells on its views, not its docks.
What endures is the culture. Several thousand people of Portuguese descent still live in and around Point Loma, the street signs still read Avenida de Portugal, and the hall on it still fills every spring. In 2026 the community crowned the queen of its 116th festa, the procession winding up to St. Agnes exactly as it has for generations, the sopas still free.
This is not a neighborhood mourning itself. It is a community that built an industry, watched it sail off, and decided to keep the part that mattered. The boats made Tunaville. The festa is what keeps it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Portuguese settle in Point Loma?
The Portuguese in Point Loma were islanders from the Azores and Madeira, drawn by a sheltered bay, a mild climate, and year-round fishing that matched skills they already had. They clustered on the bay side in La Playa and Roseville, close to the water and the canneries, and built their community around the fishing fleet.
Is Point Loma still a Portuguese neighborhood today?
The working tuna fleet is largely gone, but the Portuguese in Point Loma have kept their cultural institutions alive. Several thousand residents of Portuguese descent remain, the United Portuguese hall and St. Agnes Catholic Church still anchor the community, and the Festa do Espirito Santo still fills the streets each spring.
What are the most famous Portuguese landmarks in Point Loma?
The best known are the United Portuguese S.E.S. Hall on Avenida de Portugal, St. Agnes Catholic Church, and the Tunaman’s Memorial on Shelter Island, a bronze honoring the fishermen. The Portuguese Historical Center and Cabrillo National Monument round out the community’s landmarks.
Where did the Point Loma Portuguese come from?
Almost all came from two Atlantic island groups: the Azores, especially Pico and Faial, and the island of Madeira, particularly the fishing village of Paul do Mar. Most landed first in the Portuguese fishing colonies of New England before working their way west to San Diego.
When did the Portuguese first arrive in Point Loma?
Azorean families began settling the San Diego waterfront in the 1870s, with Madeirans following in the early twentieth century. The community organized its first Festa do Espirito Santo in 1910 and built its first Portuguese hall and chapel by 1922.
If your family’s story passed through the docks of Tunaville, the canneries of San Diego Bay, or the islands of the Azores and Madeira, those threads can still be traced and held. Communities like this one in Point Loma echo the fishing parishes of Croatian San Pedro down the coast, each built by people who crossed an ocean to keep doing what they knew.