The Esselen people lived along this coast and in the Santa Lucia high country for thousands of years before the Spanish ever named it — el país grande del sur, the big country to the south of their capital at Monterey, which time wore down to Big Sur. Homesteaders, ranchers, and lumbermen followed in the late 1800s, working sawmills, tanbark-oak harvests, and limekilns; Charles Henry Bixby ran a mill on the creek that still carries his name and shipped lumber and lime from a doghole landing at its mouth. The coast stayed nearly impassable — the only land route turned eleven miles inland, over the mountains on the old Coast Road, just to get around a single creek.
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.
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.
