The nickname “The American Riviera” fits the geography: the city faces due south along the longest south-facing stretch of coast on the West Coast outside Alaska, backed by the Santa Ynez Mountains like hills above a Mediterranean shore. Santa Barbara has guarded that coast, too — after the 1969 oil spill off this shoreline, the community’s response helped ignite the modern American environmental movement and inspire the first Earth Day in 1970, a legacy the city carries proudly.
Then came the morning of June 29, 1925, when a 6.8-magnitude earthquake leveled much of downtown. Santa Barbara answered with one of the most remarkable decisions in American city planning: it rebuilt itself from a single architectural rulebook. Led by preservationist Pearl Chase and an architectural board of review, the town mandated Spanish Colonial Revival — whitewashed stucco, red tile roofs, ironwork, arcades — and the result is the unusually coherent downtown you see today. The masterpiece came in 1929: the Santa Barbara County Courthouse, its hand-painted mural room and tiled tower regularly called the most beautiful public building in America.
Why People Visit Santa Barbara
- Tour Mission Santa Barbara, the 1786 Queen of the Missions, the tenth of the California missions and the only one in continuous Franciscan use — the 1820 twin-towered stone façade, the Sacred Garden, the cemetery, the mission museum.
- Climb the Santa Barbara County Courthouse El Mirador clock tower for the free panoramic view across the red-tile roofs to the Channel and the islands; tour the 1929 sandstone Spanish Colonial Revival interior with the painted Mural Room ceiling.
- Walk through El Presidio Real de Santa Bárbara State Historic Park, the 1782 Spanish fort site downtown — one of the four original Spanish presidios in California, now a partial reconstruction with the original Cañedo Adobe and El Cuartel still standing.
- Walk Stearns Wharf, the 1872 wooden wharf running out into the harbor — the oldest working wooden wharf in California — for shops, the Sea Center aquarium, and views back to the city against the Santa Ynez Mountains.
- Stroll State Street, the historic downtown spine of the post-1925 rebuild, lined block after block with whitewashed stucco, red tile, arches, courtyards, and ironwork.
- Visit El Paseo, the 1922 Spanish courtyard complex built around the 1819 Casa de la Guerra adobe — the architectural prototype that helped shape the post-1925 rebuild rulebook.
- Walk East Beach and West Beach, the long Channel-front sands either side of Stearns Wharf, and out to Butterfly Beach in Montecito for the south-facing afternoon light.
- Drive up to the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden in Mission Canyon, with native California plant collections and trails through the chaparral above the mission.
- Stroll the Santa Barbara Museum of Art on State Street for rotating exhibits in a 1914 Spanish-revival building.
- Catch a show at the Santa Barbara Bowl, the 1936 hillside amphitheater above downtown — one of the oldest outdoor concert venues in California.
- Take the Channel Islands ferry from the harbor out to Santa Cruz or Anacapa Island in the Channel Islands National Park, the rugged offshore archipelago the Chumash called Limuw, Anyapakh, and Tuqan.
- Time a visit for Old Spanish Days Fiesta in early August — the city's signature five-day annual festival of Spanish Colonial and Mexican-rancho heritage centered on the courthouse Sunken Garden.
