So Santa Barbara gathers a nine-thousand-year coast, a saint’s-day naming, a royal presidio, a mission called a queen, a rulebook rebuild, a courthouse called America’s most beautiful, and a bronze pod of dolphins with a twin across the Pacific — and our Santa Barbara designs gather that into wearable form. Whether Santa Barbara is your hometown, your beach, your college years, or the coast you keep coming back to, wear the history. Whitewashed since 1925, on the Channel since 1782.
What’s with the Dolphins? At the foot of Stearns Wharf, where State Street meets the sea, a bronze family of dolphins leaps from a fountain that has welcomed a million visitors a year since 1985. Sculptor Bud Bottoms dedicated it to the Chumash people, whose word for dolphin — alolk’oy — means to go around, to protect, and to go in peace; a bronze plaque of a Chumash cave painting is set into its base. And the fountain has a twin: in Toba, Japan, Santa Barbara’s sister city since 1966, an identical Dolphin Friendship Fountain faces the Pacific from the other side — two pods of bronze dolphins, one ocean between them.
Why People Visit Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara offers a south-facing Pacific coast, a 1786 mission, a 1782 presidio, a 1929 courthouse, a 1922 Spanish courtyard, a 1872 wharf, and an entire downtown legislated into matching whitewashed stucco and red tile a hundred years ago. Visitors come for the Queen of the Missions, the courthouse tower view, the wharf at sunset, the four miles of beach, the August Fiesta, and the simple Mediterranean pleasure of a city where the rulebook for what a block should look like was written down and is still followed. It is the American Riviera, and the architecture earns the name.
