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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.
There is no town center in Big Sur — no plaza, no main street; there is a road. For roughly ninety miles between Carmel and San Simeon, Highway 1 traces the edge of the continent, where the Santa Lucia Mountains drop into the sea and the coast redwoods come down almost to the surf, at the southern end of their entire natural range. Cone Peak climbs nearly a mile above the water in barely three miles — among the steepest coastal rises in the Lower 48 — and offshore the kelp forests sway in the swell. Big Sur is the stretch of California you cannot build a town on — only a road through, and the view from it.
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.
