El Camino Real lined with eucalyptus trees, Burlingame and San Mateo, California, circa 1940s

About this postcard

A black-and-white view down the El Camino Real, the old Spanish mission road, where tall eucalyptus trees line both sides of the multi-lane highway and a few automobiles approach the camera. El Camino Real connected California's twenty-one Franciscan missions from San Diego to Sonoma and remains the state's best-known historic road; the eucalyptus windbreaks along it were planted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The scene captures the corridor as a modern suburban arterial through Burlingame and San Mateo on the San Francisco Peninsula.