At 5:12 on the morning of April 18, 1906, the ground moved for the better part of a minute and San Francisco stopped existing as anyone had known it. More than two hundred thousand people were homeless; the bohemian cafés were rubble. For a remarkable number of writers and painters the answer was simple: follow Sterling. Mary Austin came and wrote in a treehouse she called the Wickiup. Jack London came and went. The photographer Arnold Genthe came, and the MacGowan sisters, and Jimmy Hopper. An Arts and Crafts Club, formed in 1905, gave them all something to argue about. By 1910 the San Francisco Call could report that sixty percent of the houses in Carmel had been built by people devoting their lives to the aesthetic arts, and that year Herbert Heron carved an outdoor stage out of the woods and called it the Forest Theater. When the village incorporated on October 31, 1916, the poets ran the council — Heron and the writer Perry Newberry would both serve as mayor — and they had chosen unpaved streets, tents and rough cottages over everything a real city offered.
The Rumsen Ohlone lived along the Carmel River long before any of what follows. In 1602 the Spanish explorer Sebastián Vizcaíno anchored in the bay and named the river Río Carmelo for the Carmelite friars sailing with him — a name that outlived the expedition by two centuries before anyone built on it. In 1770 Junípero Serra founded Mission San Carlos Borromeo at Monterey, and the next year moved it to the mouth of the Carmel River, where the soil was better and the soldiers of the presidio were farther away. He was buried beneath its floor in 1784. After secularization in the 1830s the mission fell into ruin, its roof gone and its sandstone walls open to the fog, and it stayed that way for most of a century — the picturesque wreck the painters would later come for.
Why People Visit Carmel-by-the-Sea
- Relax on Carmel Beach, a broad crescent of pale sand backed by wind-flattened Monterey cypress and famous sunset silhouettes.
- Stretch farther south along Carmel River State Beach to where the Carmel River meets the Pacific — a quieter dog-friendly stretch with bird-watching at the lagoon.
- Explore Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, with granite coves, sea lions, otters, and easy trails above turquoise water.
- Find the Comstock storybook cottages — Hansel, Gretel, and the Tuck Box — on a self-guided fairytale walk through the village lanes.
- Tour the Carmel Mission Basilica (Mission San Carlos Borromeo), with its basilica, museum rooms, and gardens set within sandstone and adobe walls.
- Visit Tor House and Hawk Tower at Carmel Point, the hand-built stone home of poet Robinson Jeffers, open for docent-led tours.
- Browse Ocean Avenue's courtyards, galleries, and flower-lined passages, then walk Scenic Road along the cliffs above the surf.
