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A map produced in 1920 illustrating the route of "El Camino Real" in 1821, along with the 21 Alta California Franciscan missions. The road at this time was merely a horse and mule trail.

El Camino Real (Spanish for The Royal Road, also known as The King's Highway) usually refers to the 600-mile (966-kilometer) California Mission Trail, connecting the former Alta California's 21 missions (along with a number of support sites), 4 presidios, and several pueblos, stretching from Mission San Diego de Alcalá in San Diego in the south to Mission San Francisco Solano in Sonoma in the north.

In fact, any road under the direct jurisdiction of the Spanish crown and its viceroys was a "camino real". Examples of such roads ran between principal settlements throughout Spain and its colonies such as New Spain. Most caminos reales had names apart from the appended "camino real". Once Mexico won its independence from Spain, no road in Mexico, including California, was any longer a camino real. The name was rarely used after that and was only revived in the American period in connection with the boosterism associated with the Mission Revival movement of the early 20th century.

The route originated in Baja California Sur, Mexico, at the site of Misión San Bruno in San Bruno (the first mission established in Las Californias), though it was only maintained as far south as Loreto.

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Today, several modern highways cover parts of the historic route, though large sections are on city streets (for instance, most of the stretch between San Jose and San Francisco). Its full modern route, as defined by the California State Legislature, is as follows:^[1][2]

• Interstate 5, U.S.-Mexico border to Anaheim
• Anaheim Boulevard, Harbor Boulevard, State Route 72 and Whittier Boulevard, Anaheim to Los Angeles
• U.S. Route 101, Los Angeles to San Jose
• State Route 82, San Jose to San Francisco
• Interstate 280, San Francisco
• U.S. Route 101, San Francisco to Novato
• State Route 37, Novato to Sears Point
• State Route 121, Sears Point to Sonoma
• State Route 12, Sonoma

East Bay route

• State Route 87, Pass through Santa Clara County and Alameda County.
• State Route 92
• State Route 238
• State Route 185, Hayward to Oakland
• State Route 123, Oakland to San Pablo (continued to Martinez)

Some older local roads that parallel these routes also have the name.

Many streets throughout California today bear the name of this famous road, often with little factual relation to the original.

A surviving, unpaved stretch of the road has been preserved next to the old Spanish mission in San Juan Bautista; this road actually follows part of the San Andreas Fault.

A historical marker situated along El Camino Real.

Modern El Camino Real was one of the first state highways in California. Given the lack of standardized road signs at the time, it was decided to place distinctive bells along the route, hung on supports in the form of an 11-foot high shepherd's crook, also described as "a Franciscan walking stick." The first of 450 bells was unveiled on August 15, 1906 at the Plaza Church in the Pueblo near Olvera Street in Los Angeles.

The original organization which installed the bells fragmented, and the Automobile Club of Southern California and associated groups cared for the bells from the mid-1920s through 1931. The State took over bell maintenance in 1933. Most of the bells eventually disappeared due to vandalism, theft or simple loss due to the relocation or rerouting of highways and roads. After a reduction in the number of bells to around 150, the State began replacing them, at first with concrete, and later with iron. A design first produced in 1960 by Justin Kramer of Los Angeles was the standard until the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) began a restoration effort in 1996.

Keith Robinson, Principal Landscape Architect at Caltrans developed an El Camino Real restoration program which resulted in the installation of 555 El Camino Real Bell Markers in 2005. The Bell Marker consists of a 460 mm diameter cast metal bell set atop a 75 mm diameter Schedule 40 pipe column that is attached to a concrete foundation using anchor rods. The original 1906 bell molds were used to fabricate the replacement bells. The replacement and original bells were produced by the California Bell Company, are dated 1769 to 1906, and include a designer's copyright notice.

El Camino Real is the subject of a bilingual pun among Stanford University computer scientists. From the Jargon File: ^[3]

In the FORTRAN language, a 'real' is a number typically precise to seven significant figures, and a 'double precision' quantity is a larger floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant digits (other languages have similar 'real' types). When a hacker from MIT, Guy L. Steele, visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a long road El Camino Real was. Making a bilingual pun on 'real', he started calling it 'El Camino Double Precision'.

When he was told that the road was hundreds of miles long (resulting in extremely large street address numbers), he renamed it 'El Camino Bignum' ["bignum" is LISP jargon for an indefinite-precision integer], and that name has stuck.

In the early 1990s, the synonym "El Camino Virtual" has been reported as an alternate at IBM and Amdahl sites in Silicon Valley. Mathematically literate hackers in the Valley have also been heard to refer to some major cross-street intersecting El Camino Real as "El Camino Imaginary" (referring to the complex plane). One popular theory is that the intersection is located near Moffett Field — where they keep all those complex planes.

A common language faux pas is to call the road "The El Camino", which literally translates to "The The Road".

• California Historical Landmark #784 — El Camino Real ("as Father Serra knew it and helped blaze it" — the segment extending from Mission San Diego de Alcalá to Mission San Francisco de Asís)

• Crump, S. (1975). California's Spanish Missions: Their Yesterdays and Todays. Trans-Anglo Books, Del Mar, CA. ISBN 0-87046-028-5. 
• Johnson, P., ed. (1964). The California Missions. Lane Book Company, Menlo Park, CA. 
• Wright, R. (1950). California's Missions. Hubert A. and Martha H. Lowman, Arroyo Grande, CA. 

• El Camino Real
• History of California
• Spanish missions in California
• Spanish missions in Baja California

• Caltrans: El Camino Real Mission Bell Marker Project
• El Camino Bignum (Jargon file entry)
• Grand Boulevard Initiative