Once the road opened, the hidden coast 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 Michael Murphy and Dick Price founded the Esalen Institute on the cliffs above the old hot springs, at the heart of the human-potential movement. The same isolation drew quieter tenants: through the Cold War, a Naval Facility at Point Sur — NAVFAC Point Sur — listened for submarines with the then-secret SOSUS hydrophone system, beside the lighthouse that had been shining since 1889.
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.
