The Sierra de San Pedro Mártir is one of the most dramatic landscapes in Baja California. The range rises sharply from the desert floor to peaks exceeding 3,000 meters — Picacho del Diablo, the highest point on the peninsula, stands at approximately 3,100 meters. Pine and fir forests cover the upper elevations, a sky island ecosystem utterly unlike the desert surrounding the range on all sides. The National Observatory of Mexico operates at the summit plateau, taking advantage of some of the clearest skies in North America. In 1794, when Loriente arrived, the mountain was simply the Kiliwa homeland: high, cold, and far from Spanish control. The mission was an assertion of that control.

The mission moved almost immediately after its founding. The first site, called Casilepe, was abandoned the same year in favor of Ajantequedo, about 13 kilometers to the northeast. This was not unusual in the Baja mission system — finding reliable water and suitable land was a persistent challenge, and the Dominicans were pragmatic about relocating. The closing date of the mission is historically uncertain, recorded as either 1806 or 1824, which itself reflects how marginal the institution had become. Either way, it lasted barely two decades as an active mission. The neophytes — the Kiliwa people who had been gathered there — were relocated to Mission Santo Domingo on the coast.

The history of Mission San Pedro Mártir de Verona is inseparable from the history of the Kiliwa people, and that history is painful. The Kiliwa had survived in the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir for centuries by mastering its seasonal rhythms: pine nuts and game in the high country, coastal resources in winter at San Felipe Bay. The mission disrupted this pattern by gathering people into a fixed location and requiring their labor and religious conversion. Disease, as at every Baja mission, did enormous damage. The Kiliwa population collapsed during the mission period. Today the Kiliwa are one of the smallest indigenous groups in Mexico, their language critically endangered. Mission San Pedro Mártir de Verona was meant to be a step toward their salvation as the Dominicans understood it. It contributed instead to conditions that nearly erased them.

Archaeological work has located possible traces of the first mission site at Casilepe. At the second site, Ajantequedo, foundations and walls still survive — low stone remnants in a high-country clearing, identifiable to those who know what to look for. The Sierra de San Pedro Mártir is now protected as a national park, and the area around the former mission site is accessible by four-wheel drive tracks through the park. The ruins are remote and rarely visited, consistent with the character of a mission that was always a marginal outpost. For historians of Baja California's mission period, the site is significant. For the Kiliwa, it represents something more complicated: a place where their ancestors were gathered and where their world was irrevocably changed.