Off the Beaten Track

Chumash Painted Cave State Historic Park

This small state park, open from dawn till dusk, is mostly visited for its cave, which bears vivid pictographs painted by the Chumash about 200 years ago. The cave is protected by a metal screen, so a flashlight is helpful for a good view. Chumash Painted Cave State Historic Park is about 12mi (19.3km) northwest of downtown Santa Barbara. The park entrance is marked only by a small brown and yellow sign and is easy to miss; look for cars parked on both sides of the road.

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Los Padres National Forest

The enormous Los Padres National Forest covers a vast tract of coastal mountain range and lowlands stretching from the Carmel Valley to the western edge of Los Angeles County. It's great for hiking, camping, horse riding and mountain biking. Before you go, check the conditions for visiting with the harbour branch of the Santa Barbara Visitor Center or with the Forest Headquarters in Goleta. If you are travelling by car, you must have the National Forest Adventure Pass in order to park in the forest.

On Paradise Rd you'll also find a famous piece of Americana: the Cold Spring Tavern, a legendary stagecoach stop that's still a popular watering hole and restaurant. A rough-hewn plank floor connects a warren of dimly lit rooms festooned with an odd assortment of Western memorabilia and framed photographs and newspaper articles. The food, alas, is mediocre and overpriced, so maybe just have coffee or some mineral water.

Paradise Rd, which crosses Hwy 154 north of San Marcos Pass, offers the best access to developed facilities in the forest. About 4mi (6.4km) up the road is a ranger station with posted maps and information. At Red Rocks (clearly marked from the ranger station), the Santa Ynez River runs into deep pools amongst rocks and waterfalls, making it a delicious place for swimming and sunning. Many hiking trails start out from here.

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Santa Barbara Wine Country

For a pleasant day of sightseeing and drinking, take Hwy 154 out of town and head into the Santa Ynez Valley, the heart of Santa Barbara's wine country. Fortuitous fog and ocean breezes waft into the valley, creating little pockets of weather well suited for growing grapes. About three dozen wineries, mostly family-run, produce Chardonnays as well as Pinot Noir, Merlot, and Cabernet Sauvignon varieties. Most are open for touring and tasting, and some have lovely picnic grounds. The visitor centres in Santa Barbara distribute free maps with brief descriptions of each winery, including tasting room hours. Worthwhile stops include Sunstone, just off Hwy 246, and Foley, south of Hwy 154.

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Solvang

If there was a Cutest Place In The World Competition one of the finalists would surely be Solvang, in the Santa Ynez Valley, about 50 minutes drive or bus-ride northeast of Santa Barbara. Solvang is a small town built in the Danish fashion, complete with windmills, gas-lit street lamps and 'gingerbread' houses. The town started in 1911 when three Danish farmers founded the Atterdag College folk school in an attempt to pass on Danish history and tradition to children who had only ever eaten a danish. The small town that grew up around the school was named Solvang (meaning 'sunny field') and today looks like a Scandinavian theme park; its diminutive streets are lined with bakeries, gift shops and galleries.

The Elverhøj Museum, housed in a reproduction 18th-century Jutland farmhouse, is the town's local history museum. It has a collection of papierklip (paper cut-out) art, period clothes and furniture, farm tools and old photographs. The Hans Christian Andersen Museum keeps a selection of Andersen's books, manuscripts, letters and photographs, and more papierklip, created by the author himself.

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South Coast Railroad Museum

If you love a train, don't miss this museum, located about 8mi (12.8km) northwest of downtown Santa Barbara. It houses a huge model railroad, and a sizable collection of railway artefacts and old photographs. Children - and let's face it, adults - will get a kick out of taking a turn on the miniature train-ride. Be sure to wear a floppy peaked cap and striped overalls. Whoo-wooo!

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Santa Barbara Activities Like any self-respecting Californian beach city, Santa Barbara offers 'awesome' swimming, surfing, kayaking, sailing, jet skiing and jet boating, and if that isn't enough, you can go whale-watching on a state-of-the-art high-speed catamaran operating from Santa Barbara Harbor and the Channel Islands. Of Santa Barbara's several beaches, the biggest and most popular is East Beach, the long sandy stretch between Stearns Wharf and Montecito. But there's also Butterfly Beach, at the east end of East Beach, where Armani swimsuits and Gucci sunglasses abound; and West Beach, between Stearns Wharf and the harbor, which has calm water and is popular with families and tourists staying in nearby motels. On the other side of the harbor, Leadbetter Beach is a good spot for surfing and windsurfing. There are some excellent hiking trails around the Santa Ynez foothills, most of which cut through rugged chaparral and steep canyons and offer spectacular coastal views. There are also hiking trails all over the Los Padres National Forest, as well as camping, horseback riding and mountain biking. You can hire bikes in Santa Barbara for cycling along the Cabrillo Bikeway on the beachfront between the Andree Clark Bird Refuge and Leadbetter Beach, and along the Goleta Bikeway, which continues west to UCSB. back to top   Santa Barbara History For more than 12,000 years before European settlement the Santa Barbara area was inhabited by the Chumash tribe of native American Indians. The Chumash lived in hundreds of villages along the coast and in the Santa Ynez Mountains, mostly in round thatched tepees called an ap. Each village also had at least one sweathouse or apa yik, a playground, and an area marked out for ceremonial dance and ritual. The Chumash were particularly skilled at weaving and basketry. They fished, hunted and traded baskets for food with other tribes, setting out to sea in large redwood plank canoes, or tomol. There is a melancholy story of an elderly Chumash man building one last tomol for curious anthropologists in 1913. In 1602, the Spanish cartographer Sebastian Vizcaíno, in command of several frigates, mapped parts of the lower Californian coast, searching for a way through to the Atlantic and new trading routes for the Spanish Empire. Landing in a harbour after a severe storm, Vizcaíno named it after the saint he and his men had prayed to, the saint who had interceded to save their lives. They were saved on December 4; the Feast Day of St Barbara. The Spanish did not settle the area until 1782, when a group of soldiers led by Governor Felipe de Neve crossed overland from Mexico and built a military fort or presidio, which still stands in downtown Santa Barbara. The Mission Santa Barbara was founded four years later. What followed, during the so-called 'Golden Years' of the California missions, was the forced conversion of the Chumash people, who were housed around the Mission and taught to wear European clothes and adopt European customs. Concentrated in the mission towns, many Chumash were killed by European diseases. In 1822, Spain lost its Californian possessions to Mexico, who in turn lost them to the United States in 1848. Gold was found in California the next year, and silver in 1860. Through all this, Santa Barbara stayed a tiny frontier station - until the 1880s, when wealthy Americans from the East Coast began to holiday on the sunny Santa Barbara beaches. Rapidly the town began to turn into what it is today: a resort city favoured by business people and celebrities. Filmmakers operated out of Santa Barbara even before they settled in Hollywood; from 1910 to 1920 the American Film Company, based at the corner of Mission and State Sts, made hundreds of films in the area, most of them Westerns. In 1925 local authorities decided, in the wake of an earthquake that destroyed much of the town, to rebuild it in faux Spanish colonial style. More recently, Santa Barbara has earned the reputation as a home for affluent newlyweds and retirees: 'the newly-wed and the nearly-dead'. Students from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) campus make sure some parts of the city are a little more exciting, but most of Santa Barbara is happy to keep the place clean, orderly and subdued. back to top