St. Anthony of Padua, the patron of this place, was a Portuguese by birth, who entered the Franciscan Order. He went as a missionary to the Moors, but was compelled by illness to return to Europe, where he had great success in Italy and France as a preacher. Among many miracles accredited to him is the one thus related: “When preaching at the funeral of a very rich man, St. Anthony denounced his love of money, and exclaimed, ‘His heart is buried in his treasure chest; go seek it there and you will find it.’ The friends of the man broke open the chest, and to their surprise, found the heart; they then examined his body and found that his heart was indeed wanting.”—(Stories of the Saints.)
POINT CYPRESS
La Punta de los Cipreses (Point Cypress), is the home of those wonderful trees, twisted and gnarled into a thousand fantastic shapes by their age-long struggle against the ocean winds, which furnish yet another proof of the part played by California in the preservation of the rare and the unique, for this species of coniferous tree is said to be confined to that region, not occurring in any other part of the world.
The following interesting paragraph on these trees is quoted from The Trees of California, by Willis Linn Jepsen, Asst. Professor of Dendrology in the University of California: “Cupressus Macrocarpa is limited to two localities on the ocean shore at the mouth of the Carmel river near Monterey. The Cypress Point grove extends along the cliffs and low bluffs from Pescadero Point to Cypress Point, a distance of two miles, reaching inland about one-eighth of a mile. The Point Lobos grove is much smaller. The trees are scattered over the summits of two headlands, and cling to the edges of the cliffs, where on account of the erosive action of the ocean, they are occasionally under-mined and fall into the sea. Monterey Cypress is most interesting for its remarkably restricted natural range and the exceedingly picturesque outlines characteristic of the trees growing on the ocean shore. As a result of their struggle with violent storms from the Pacific Ocean which break on the unprotected cliffs and headlands of Cypress Point and Point Lobos, they present a variety and singularity of form which is obviously connected with their exposed habitat, and lends a never-failing interest to these two narrow localities. Of the highly picturesque trees, the most common type is that with long irregular arms. Such trees recall most strikingly the classical pictures of the Cedars of Lebanon. Monterey Cypress is of course a genuine cypress and Lebanon Cedar a genuine cedar; the two do not even belong to the same family of conifers. Yet the popular story that the two are the same makes so strong an appeal to the imagination of the tourist at Monterey that the guides and promoters in the region will doubtless never cease to disseminate it. As a consequence the error goes into the daily press and the magazines, and is evidently destined to flourish in perennial greenness under the guise of fact. The wide dissemination of this fiction is all the more remarkable in that in the case of all other unique features of the state, such as the Sequoias and the Yosemite, our Californians have evinced a remarkable pride in their possession, without thought of inventing a duplication of them elsewhere.... The matter of the age of these trees has been much exaggerated. It is a tree of rapid growth, and the older specimens are probably not more than 200 or 300 years old.”
The above paragraph, quoted from a writer acknowledged to be one of the best authorities on the trees of California, is given here in full, in the hope of correcting these two common errors concerning the Monterey Cypress,—the one that it is identical with the Cedar of Lebanon, the other, an exaggerated notion of the great age of some of the trees. As Professor Jepsen justly remarks, the truth in this case is a greater matter for pride than the fiction.
POINT PINOS
La Punta de Pinos (the point of pines), is situated a few miles from Monterey, just beyond Pacific Grove. It is one of the most picturesque points on the coast, and is the location of one of the government light-houses.