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 Monterey, which time wore down to Big Sur. Homesteaders, ranchers, and lumbermen followed in the late 1800s, working sawmills and limekilns in the canyons; Charles Henry Bixby ran a landing and a mill on the creek that still carries his name. For all of them the coast was magnificent and nearly impassable — the only land route turned eleven miles inland just to get around a single creek. That changed in 1919, when California began the Carmel–San Simeon Highway. Crews spent eighteen years cutting the roadbed into the cliffs; the Bixby Creek Bridge was completed on October 15, 1932, and the full highway opened in 1937.
Where the Santa Lucia Mountains fall straight into the Pacific — Highway 1, the Bixby Bridge, and ninety miles of California coast. There is no town center in Big Sur — no plaza, no main street. There is a road. For roughly ninety miles between Carmel and San Simeon, Highway 1 traces the edge of the continent, where the Santa Lucia Mountains drop into the sea and the coast redwoods come down almost to the surf. Its signature is the Bixby Creek Bridge, an open-spandrel concrete arch finished in 1932 — 714 feet long, 280 feet above the canyon floor, and one of the most photographed bridges in California. The road that carries it took eighteen years to build, from 1919 to 1937, blasted and cut foot by foot into cliffs that had kept this coast nearly unreachable. Big Sur is the stretch of California you cannot build a town on — only a road through, and the view from it.
Why People Visit Big Sur California
- Stop at the Bixby Creek Bridge — the 1932 open-spandrel concrete arch, 714 feet long and 280 feet high, and the most photographed point on the Big Sur coast.
- See McWay Falls in Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park — an eighty-foot waterfall that drops straight onto a cove beach below Highway 1.
- Walk among the coast redwoods at Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, and find the purple-tinted sand at Pfeiffer Beach just down the road.
- Tour Point Sur Lighthouse — the 1889 light station on a volcanic rock dome rising from the sea.
- Hike the bluffs and canyons of Garrapata, Andrew Molera, and Limekiln state parks, and into the Ventana Wilderness in Los Padres National Forest.
- Watch for sea otters in the kelp, gray whales offshore in winter and spring, and California condors riding the updrafts over the cliffs.
- Drive the full Carmel–San Simeon stretch of Highway 1 — the ninety-mile coast road where the Santa Lucia Mountains meet the Pacific.
