The rest of Big Sur stayed wild on purpose. State parks — Pfeiffer Big Sur in the redwoods, Andrew Molera at the river mouth, Garrapata and Limekiln on the bluffs — back onto the Ventana Wilderness and Los Padres National Forest. McWay Falls drops eighty feet in Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park onto a beach that did not exist until a 1983 landslide built it; before that the falls poured straight into the sea. The sand at Pfeiffer Beach runs purple with manganese garnet washed from the hills, gray whales pass offshore in winter, and California condors — back from the edge of extinction — ride the updrafts over the cliffs.
Today Big Sur is one of the most celebrated coastlines on earth, and a protected one — most of it state park, national forest, and wilderness, with a handful of lodges and the road threaded between. People come for the drive: the Bixby Bridge, McWay Falls, the Pfeiffer redwoods, the Point Sur light, and the long blue gaps of nothing but cliff and water. Our Big Sur designs gather that coast into wearable form — the bridge, the highway, the mountains meeting the sea. Explore the collection and wear a little of that wild coast.
Why People Visit Big Sur California
Big Sur is the rare place whose entire identity is its landscape. There is no historic plaza, no downtown — there is the road, the bridge, and one of the most dramatic meetings of mountain and ocean anywhere on earth. Visitors come to drive the coast, to photograph the Bixby Bridge, to stand above McWay Falls, and to watch condors over a shoreline that was nearly impossible to reach a century ago. They come because Big Sur is California with almost nothing built on it — only revealed, mile by mile, from a two-lane road.
