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.
Mexican rule arrived in 1822 and turned the coast to cattle ranchos; American statehood followed, and Santa Barbara incorporated on April 9, 1850 as the seat of its county. Stearns Wharf reached into the channel in 1872 — today the oldest working wooden wharf in California — the great Moreton Bay fig tree was planted in 1876, and in the 1910s the Flying A silent-film studio briefly made Santa Barbara one of the movie capitals of the world, before Hollywood took the industry south. El Paseo, the Spanish courtyard marketplace, opened in 1922.
Why People Visit Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara offers a south-facing Pacific coast, a 1786 mission, a 1782 presidio, a 1929 courthouse, a 1922 Spanish courtyard, a 1872 wharf, and an entire downtown legislated into matching whitewashed stucco and red tile a hundred years ago. Visitors come for the Queen of the Missions, the courthouse tower view, the wharf at sunset, the four miles of beach, the August Fiesta, and the simple Mediterranean pleasure of a city where the rulebook for what a block should look like was written down and is still followed. It is the American Riviera, and the architecture earns the name.
