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.
Our Monterey logo carries California's grizzly bear and lone star above “California Republic — Est. 1850,” the shared retro emblem of our California places, drawn in worn black-and-white like an old crate label or cannery stamp. The 1850 marks the year Monterey was incorporated as a city — the same year California became a state. The bear is the through-line that links Monterey to every other California town we make; what makes this one Monterey is everything around it — the first capital, the adobes, the canneries, and the bay.
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.
