Main avenue of approach to Santa Cruz is this fine highway from Los Gatos. Curving gently through the Santa Cruz Mountains, it brings to view a wealth of lovely scenes. Under construction is a by-pass which will take its traffic off Los Gatos’ streets.
Santa Cruz has its face to the future. Monterey, at the other end of Monterey Bay, never forgets that it was the place where history began for this region.
It was in what is now the city of Monterey that Portola, first governor of California, and Father Junipero Serra landed in 1770. Under an oak tree near the shore the good father held a service and founded a mission. A stone cross today marks the spot, though the mission was soon removed to its present site at the mouth of the Carmel Valley to be away from the presidio, or military post, which Portola set up. At this mission Father Serra made his headquarters and from it he supervised the building of the mission chain.
Under Spanish rule, presidio and mission were almost all the settlement but after Mexico had gained independence, adobe homes grew up in the hills, stores were built along the crooked streets and the Mexican government, less averse to foreign trade than the Spaniards, built a customs house. This still stands and, restored, houses a museum. It is one of five State Historical Monuments in the region, the others being the Serra landing place already mentioned: the Casa del Oro, which housed a store: the house where Robert Louis Stevenson lived for a few months late in 1879, and California’s First Theater, originally a sailors’ boarding house.
There are also standing more than a score of other structures erected in this Mexican era, including one built in 1835 by Thomas Oliver Larkin, first United States consul at Monterey, and Colton Hall, meeting place of the Constitutional Convention in 1849. This, like almost all the other remaining buildings, has been restored.
Monterey has laid out a scenic route leading directly to or near all of these historic structures, and also including several historic sites. Visitors may traverse this route merely by following an orange line painted on the street paving. At many points on it, special parking is reserved for them.
Whichever way you turn, there is something to be seen in this region. Just across from the Customs House is Fisherman’s Wharf, where the restaurants would feel unhappy if they had to serve you today fish that was caught as long ago as yesterday. Alongside it, the fishing fleet, decked in all the colors of the rainbow, rides at anchor. Farther along the beautiful ocean drive is the Hopkins Marine Institute, operated by Stanford University, and beyond that is Pacific Grove, with its beautiful marine park and beach at Lover’s Point and its famous Butterfly Trees.
Each October, thousands of Monarch butterflies migrate from Canada and Alaska to cluster on these pine trees in a small reservation known as Butterfly Park.
How the butterflies know which trees are “home” no one can explain, for they are hatched and pass through their chrysalis stage in the North. Indeed, in recent years it appears they have become confused: the number now visiting the original trees is greatly reduced and many of them are frequenting other pines several blocks away.
