The waterfront tells a different century. Monterey was a Chinese, Japanese, and Sicilian fishing village before the sardine canneries arrived around 1900 and turned the shoreline into an industrial machine. At its peak Cannery Row ran two dozen canneries and reduction plants, and for a while Monterey was one of the busiest fishing ports in the Western Hemisphere — the street later made famous by the Monterey novelist John Steinbeck. When the fishery collapsed at mid-century the canneries closed, and the buildings waited decades for their second life as the Row you walk today.
South of town the land turns wild at Point Lobos, the granite-and-cypress headland often called the crown jewel of California's state parks, where sea otters raft in the kelp and the surf breaks white against the rocks. Monterey Bay itself is a drowned submarine canyon — deep, cold, and astonishingly rich with life — which is why the old Hovden cannery at the end of the Row was reborn in 1984 as a place to look at the sea instead of empty it. The same water that built the canneries now draws people to watch whales and otters in it.
Why People Visit Monterey
Monterey rewards visitors who want the original California — the first capital, a town of 18th-century adobes, and a deep, wild bay. People come for the Path of History and Cannery Row, for Point Lobos and the marine sanctuary, and for an easy, scenic stretch of Central Coast where Spanish-colonial heritage and a famous waterfront sit side by side.
