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
- 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. Note that a county no-parking zone took effect around the bridge in August 2026 — use the designated pullouts and never stop on the span.
- 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.
