Hacienda Puts Out Welcome Mat : Recreation: Historic Rancho Guajome offers visitors the chance to relive a bit of California’s Spanish heritage.

Most days, if you break into Rancho Guajome’s jail, you’re likely to hear the shshshshkshksh! of a rattlesnake. Poke your head in the pantry and fwop! A bat will sweep past. In a guest-room’s twilight, four lamps will stare you down. Owls.

But not today.

“Come in senors ! Welcome senoras !”

Dona Ysidora Bandini de Couts sweeps the door open. In her full, black, rustling robes, she radiates Spanish splendor. With her Mantilla, her earrings woven from human hair and her finger-ring kerchief holder--the kind that releases the handkerchief to “accidentally” fall in front of a desirable Don--Dona Ysidora is quite the Grande Dame.

OK. It’s not really Dona Ysidora. It’s Mary Ward, San Diego County’s parks and recreation historian, and this woman has a very Spanish mission. In the wilds east of Oceanside, she has discovered a world that officially disappeared 100 years ago.

Welcome to Rancho Guajome, “Ramona’s” hideaway.

You know, “Ramona”--the song, the three movies and, of course, the book (of which there have been 141 printings since 1884). They’re all the story of the half-Indian girl adopted by Spanish California grandees who falls in love with an Indian and pays a bitter price for the times in which she lives.

Here is where Ramona grew up. At least in the mind of her creator, Helen Hunt Jackson.

“Here” is Rancho Guajome, a strange and haunting building that is one of the few country estates to survive intact from the age of the Silver Dons, when California was Mexico and Americans were the illegal aliens.

Like the story of Ramona, this rancho has miraculously survived. The place has beaten the odds by lying virtually invisible in a valley penetrated by only the old Santa Fe stage road as it leaves the city of Vista. The hacienda sits under a slope, distantly visible from the legions of tract houses that peek over the surrounding hills.

Inside, the hacienda has remained eerily unchanged over the decades. In the tack room, there are ancient halters and reins, hanging as if waiting for Dona’s Major-Domo to saddle up a pony. In the blacksmith’s shop, dusty old carriages sit halfway through repairs, as if the blacksmith had just popped out for some almuerzo .

Even the bougainvillea in the inner courtyard is flowering as it must have for a hundred years. The old pink climbing rose still caresses the veranda posts. The pepper tree, a cutting from the first one to arrive in California from Peru, shades one corner. The fountain waits for water.

The rancho’s name comes from the Luiseno Indian word Whakavumi , “the frog pond.” Indeed, the rising damp from the nearby bog is eating through the adobe walls at an alarming rate.

That’s got to stop, says Mary Ward. California’s Spanish heritage is at stake here. “This rancho,” she says passionately, “represents one of the last saveable structures from the great 19th Century Rancho era.”

“Dona Ysidora” Ward ushers the fancy-dressed group into the outer courtyard. The guests this day are docents from San Diego’s Old Town, dressed up as members of the family that lived here. They say they have “adopted” these identities, researched them, tried to become them. “Ooh,” says one high-bustled senorita , “a mission bell!”

She walks over to touch a huge, rusting, iron bell sitting on a block of wood.

“Not a mission bell, my dear,” says Ysidora authoritatively. “That is a mail-order bell. The family bought it from Sears’ catalogue in the 1890s. They paid $25.”

A park ranger from Old Town, George Crowe, plays the role of Col. Cave Johnson Couts, the West Point graduate from Tennessee who came to California to help wrest the state from Mexico. But the colonel ended up marrying into the Mexican Bandini family in 1851 and building this rancho.

“He was . . . a character,” says Crowe of his alter ego. “He was accused of beating some of his Indian workers and squatters on his land to death. He killed his major domo in the square in Old Town--your classic Western shoot-out. But he was canny, too. He made a lot of money feeding the gold miners with his cattle, and he was really San Diego’s first surveyor. And he built this place, in true Spanish style.”

Mary Ward’s passion for such colorful history led her to a job with the Department of Parks and Recreation, attending to San Diego County’s often-neglected historical landmarks. Ten years ago, the county asked her to research Rancho Guajome to win it official recognition as a historic site.

“I have a feeling for this place. It was a genteel way of living that will enrich us all,” said Ward.

San Diego County has kept developers out of the valley by creating the Rancho Guajome Regional Park. The California Conservation Corps has helped roof some rotting areas, and the chapel and kitchen have been restored. But there has never been the money to tackle the hacienda as a whole. And time is running out.

The adobe structure is fighting the rising damp from the nearby swamps. When the adobe was stuccoed in the 1920s, the dampness was trapped into the structure, and its thick walls began to crumble back into sand.

Until this year, there have been precious few resources to fight the deterioration.

This day, Mary Ward gathers her group of visitors near the climbing rose in the inner courtyard for an announcement.

“I want you to know that we have recently been allocated about $800,000 for essential stabilization of these buildings. Now we can make this worthy of its status as a National Historic Landmark. We need about $3.5 million to complete the restoration, but we are on the way!”

Now, at last, the 10-year struggle to save Rancho Guajome is beginning to pay off. Now, there is real hope that schoolchildren will be able to come in and see more than abandoned carriages and crumbling walls. Someday, the fountains will flow.

Eventually, this may even become a working ranch again. But to capture the real feeling of the last century and the lost culture, some Rancho fans suggest you visit now, before it’s prettied up.

There’s still magic in the derelict inner courtyard. Its fountain, climbing roses and verandas look very much the same--hauntingly beautiful, as they must have when the walls echoed with the laughter of Ysidora’s eight children.

Outside the chapel, where some family members are buried under a huge aloe plant, the visitors take up a collection using a black top hat. Mary Ward says she’ll use the money to repair a small crib.

The day’s visitors return to their cars, leaving the hacienda to its past. In 1884, “Ramona’s” creator, Helen Hunt Jackson, called her Rancho Guajome “one of the best specimens . . . of the representative house of the half-barbaric, half-elegant, wholly generous and free-handed life led there . . . with more of sentiment and gaiety in it, more romance than will ever be seen again on those sunny shores.

“The aroma of it lingers there still . . . in fact it can never be quite lost, so long as there is left standing one such house.”

How to get there: 2210 N. Santa Fe Drive, Vista. Interstate 5 to Mission Road exit. Go 7 miles east on Route 76 to Santa Fe Drive. Open for tours 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, or by appointment. For reservations, call (619) 565-3600. Donation requested. By appointment, $1 per person. Manson is a free-lance writer based in Coronado.