Santa Barbara

Before there was even a Santa Barbara, before the Bronze Age, and ancient Oak Grove people lived here. Then later, equally mysterious Hunting People arrived with improved technology: arrows, clubs, spearheads, and tools used for digging shellfish.

These hunters and gathers slowly merged their society with still later arrivals to become the industrious Chumash, whose few descendants today live inland along nearby coasts. The Chumash, Christianized by Spanish missionaries, were wiped out by foreign diseases, their own social and spiritual decline, and alcoholism.

Santa Barbara traces its history back to the earliest days of Spanish settlement in alta California. In 1602 Spanish conquistador Sebastian Vizcaino sailed into Santa Barbara Bay and named it for the saint who held that birthdate.

A military fortress was established in 1782; the mission was founded 4 years later by Father Fermin Francisco de Lausen. For many years, aristocratic Spanish families made Santa Barbara the social capital of Alta California even if Monterey was designated the political capital. With mission secularization, Santa Barbara high society became landed gentry, but only briefly. The grand ranchos all dried up, littered with cattle bones picked clean by condors and vultures during the devastating droughts of the 1860s.

Upstart Americans than snatched up the land and with it, local political power. In the late 1880s the industrialists arrived along with old money, banks, brokerage houses, and the Southern Pacific Railroad.

In June of 1929 an earthquake leveled the city, leaving it in ruins. During the city's reconstruction, a quickly formed architectural board declared that new buildings in Santa Barbara would henceforth be Mediterranean in design and style, appropriate to the area's climate and sympathetic to its Hispanic cultural heritage.

Santa Barbara was barely back on its feet as a city when a Japanese submarine surfaced offshore in 1942 to attack a nearby oil refinery.

Oil was an issue again in 1969, when a massive spill from an offshore oil rig blackened 20 miles of beaches in Santa Barbara, killing thousands of sea- and shorebirds and destroying the local marine economy.

Mission Santa Barbara (E. Los Olivas and Laguna), called the "Queen of the Missions", and California's tenth, was founded in 1786 and named for Santa Barbara Virgin and Martyr, a Roman virgin who was beheaded by her pagan father. The mission was subsequently flattened by the 1812 earthquake, the same year the town on the coastal plain below was all but swept away by a huge tidal wave.

The Santa Barbara County Courthouse (1100 Anacapa St.) was built in 1929 and is a fine example of Spanish-Moorish-style architecture. There is a good view of the city from the top of the clock tower or mirador balcony. Daily 9-5 FREE

Moreton Bay Fig Tree (Chapala & Montecito) is considered the nation's largest. They say that it is large enough to shelter 10,000 people form the sun.