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.
Once the road opened, the coast that had hidden the homesteaders began to draw the writers. A mid-century artists' and writers' colony took root in the canyons — Henry Miller settled here in the 1940s — and in 1962 the Esalen Institute opened on the cliffs above the hot springs, at the heart of the human-potential movement. The rest of Big Sur stayed wild on purpose: a string of state parks backed by the Ventana Wilderness and Los Padres National Forest, McWay Falls dropping eighty feet onto a hidden cove beach, the purple sand at Pfeiffer Beach, sea otters in the kelp, gray whales offshore, and California condors brought back from the edge of extinction riding the updrafts overhead. Big Sur is the California you can't move to — only drive through, slowly, with the windows down.
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.
