The nickname “The American Riviera” fits the geography: the city faces due south along the longest south-facing stretch of coast on the West Coast outside Alaska, backed by the Santa Ynez Mountains like hills above a Mediterranean shore. Santa Barbara has guarded that coast, too — after the 1969 oil spill off this shoreline, the community’s response helped ignite the modern American environmental movement and inspire the first Earth Day in 1970, a legacy the city carries proudly.
Mexican rule arrived in 1822 and turned the coast to cattle ranchos; American statehood followed, and Santa Barbara incorporated on April 9, 1850 as the seat of its county. Stearns Wharf reached into the channel in 1872 — today the oldest working wooden wharf in California — the great Moreton Bay fig tree was planted in 1876, and in the 1910s the Flying A silent-film studio briefly made Santa Barbara one of the movie capitals of the world, before Hollywood took the industry south. El Paseo, the Spanish courtyard marketplace, opened in 1922.
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.
