The coast's stories tend to be about the road and the weather. Old-timers will tell you the highway was built in part by convict crews from camps strung along the route, that the bridge concrete was mixed to match the color of the cliffs, and that for years the only way to phone out was a party line run pole to pole down the canyon. The winters the road washes out — and it does, in slides with names like Paul's and Regent's — Big Sur goes quiet and half-island again, the way it was before 1937, until Caltrans cuts it back open. The condors that vanished from these cliffs in the twentieth century now ride the updrafts over the bridge once more. Every story here circles back to the same two facts: the mountains are falling into the sea, and there is exactly one road through.
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.
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.
