🇺🇸 United States · West Coast and California
The Monterey Peninsula brings together some of the most beautiful coastal landscapes in California and two towns with very different but complementary personalities. Monterey, the former first capital of California, keeps its Spanish and Mexican history, its waterfront and its celebrated Cannery Row, the street of the canning factories immortalized by the writer John Steinbeck, today turned into a tourist promenade with the extraordinary Monterey Bay Aquarium.
A few kilometers away, Carmel-by-the-Sea is a charming town of storybook houses, art galleries, boutiques and a white-sand beach, with a bohemian character inherited from the colony of artists and writers who settled there in the early 20th century. Between the two, the legendary 17-Mile Drive winds along cliffs, mansions, golf courses (including the mythical Pebble Beach) and the iconic Lone Cypress, one of the most photographed trees in the world.
This guide covers Monterey and Carmel with a practical eye: how to visit the aquarium (with its real fee), drive the 17-Mile Drive, enjoy Cannery Row and Carmel, see marine wildlife, and take trips to Point Lobos or Big Sur. A destination of coast, history, art and nature in the heart of coastal California.
For thousands of years the Monterey Peninsula was the territory of the Ohlone peoples (Rumsen and others). The navigator Sebastián Vizcaíno entered the bay in 1602 and named it 'Monterey' in honor of the viceroy of New Spain, the Count of Monterrey. In 1770 the Spanish founded the Presidio and the Mission of San Carlos Borromeo here (later moved to Carmel by Friar Junípero Serra), and Monterey became the capital of Alta California, first under Spanish and then under Mexican rule. In 1846, during the war between the United States and Mexico, U.S. forces raised their flag in Monterey, and in 1849 the town hosted the convention that drafted California's first constitution. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Monterey lived through the boom of the sardine canning industry on Cannery Row, portrayed by John Steinbeck, until overfishing exhausted the stocks and the factories closed in the middle of the 20th century. Carmel, for its part, was born as a colony of artists and bohemians. Today both live on tourism, culture and marine conservation, with the aquarium as their great emblem. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The golden state of the Pacific: land of dozens of Native peoples and of the Franciscan missions, forged by the gold rush of 1849, today the largest economy in the United States and the cradle of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and legendary parks such as Yosemite and Sequoia.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few cities in the United States have been so many things as Monterey: Spanish capital, Mexican capital, birthplace of California's first constitution and, later, world capital of the canned sardine. All of that in a strip of coast less than ten kilometers long. But before the first flag and the first factory, the Monterey Peninsula and the banks of the Carmel River were, for thousands of years, home to the Ohlone peoples, and in particular the Rumsen. They lived off the bay's rich marine life —seals, fish, shellfish— and off hunting and gathering in a generous land, organized in villages with their own language and culture.
The first substantial documented European contact came in December 1602, when the expedition of the Spanish navigator Sebastián Vizcaíno entered the bay and named it 'Monterey' in honor of the man financing the voyage: Gaspar de Zúñiga, Count of Monterrey and viceroy of New Spain. Vizcaíno described the bay with such enthusiasm that for more than a century and a half it was considered a key harbor, although Spain did not colonize it right away.
Effective colonization did not arrive until 1770, as part of the great Spanish plan to occupy and secure Alta California against other powers. That year, an expedition by land and sea led by the soldier Gaspar de Portolá and the Franciscan friar Junípero Serra established a presidio (fort) and a mission at Monterey, marking the birth of colonial Monterey.
With the founding of the Presidio of Monterey in 1770, the town became the capital of Alta California, first under Spanish rule and, after Mexican independence in 1821, under Mexican rule. For decades, Monterey was the political, military and commercial center of all colonial California, seat of the governors and the region's main port.
The mission that Friar Junípero Serra founded beside the presidio in 1770, the Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, was moved the following year to the nearby valley of the Carmel River, where there was better land and water, giving rise to the Carmel Mission. Serra set up his headquarters there as president of the California mission system, and from there he directed the founding of the mission chain. He died in 1784 and is buried in the Carmel church.
The system of missions, presidios and towns transformed the region profoundly and, as across California, came at a tragic cost to the Native peoples, decimated by disease and by the mission regime. Monterey, meanwhile, grew as capital, with the adobe buildings that still make up the town's historic center today.
Monterey's Mexican era ended in the middle of the war between the United States and Mexico. On 7 July 1846, Commodore John D. Sloat landed at Monterey and raised the U.S. flag over the Custom House (today the oldest historic building in California), claiming Alta California for the United States. The cession was formalized in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Monterey kept a leading role in the new state's first steps. In 1849, in the Colton Hall building, the constitutional convention met that drafted California's first Constitution, a bilingual document (in English and Spanish) that reflected the region's Hispanic heritage. Shortly afterward, California joined the United States as a state in 1850.
With the gold rush and the rise of San Francisco and Sacramento, however, California's center of gravity shifted north, and Monterey lost its role as capital and much of its political weight. The town would enter a quieter stage, until a new industry —this time tied to the sea— would put it back on the map.
In the early 20th century, Monterey became one of the world capitals of fish canning. The abundance of sardines in the bay gave rise to a thriving canning industry concentrated on a street facing the sea, Ocean View Avenue, which filled up with factories, docks and workers. At its peak, during the 1930s and 1940s, Monterey became one of the largest fishing ports in the country.
That street and its world of laborers, fishermen and marginal characters were immortalized by the writer John Steinbeck —a Nobel laureate born in nearby Salinas— in his novel 'Cannery Row' (1945) and other works. The novel's name ended up sticking, and today the street is officially called Cannery Row in his honor.
But the success led to overexploitation: intensive fishing exhausted the sardine stocks, which collapsed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The factories closed one after another and the area was left abandoned and in decline for years. Cannery Row would have to be reinvented to bring it back to life, something that would happen with a visionary project linked, this time, to the conservation of the sea.
While Monterey was living through its industrial era, neighboring Carmel-by-the-Sea followed a very different path. In the early 20th century, drawn by its beauty and its light, artists, writers and poets settled there —among them Robinson Jeffers, who built his stone house Tor House— and gave the town a bohemian, artistic character. Carmel developed with peculiar planning rules (houses without numbers, no sidewalks on many streets, protection of the trees) that preserve its storybook air to this day. Decades later, the actor Clint Eastwood even became its mayor.
Monterey's great reinvention came in 1984 with the opening of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, housed in an old canning factory on Cannery Row. The aquarium, a pioneer in marine conservation and in showing the local ecosystem —with its famous kelp forest and its otters—, revitalized the whole area and turned it into a first-rank tourist destination. The bay, moreover, is today a protected national marine sanctuary.
Today Monterey and Carmel live on tourism, culture, food and nature. The 17-Mile Drive, Pebble Beach, Point Lobos, nearby Big Sur and the region's own history draw travelers from all over the world. From first Spanish capital to a mecca of marine conservation and coastal tourism, the Monterey Peninsula condenses a good part of California's history and beauty.