People were here long before any of that. The Costanoan, or Ohlone, lived on Monterey Bay for thousands of years before the first ship arrived. A Spanish expedition under Sebastián Vizcaíno sailed in in 1602 and named the harbor for the Count of Monte Rey; the name stuck, though no one came back to settle for another 168 years. Then on June 3, 1770, Gaspar de Portolá and Father Junípero Serra came ashore and founded the presidio and mission that became the town — the mission itself moving south to neighboring Carmel the following year.
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.
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.
