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29 April 2024
Santa Barbara
We offer a wide choice of cheap flights to Florida together with Santa Barbara hotels, tours and self-drive itineraries.
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Glamour-by-the-sea
Just two hours up the coast from Los Angeles lies the resort that has become the most exclusive, and enticing , in California. Henry Sutton reveals why Santa Barbara is already home to the likes of Kevin Costner, Oprah Witfrey and John Cleese.
1 A typical Santa Barbara street 2 Santa Barbara Marina 3 Stearns Wharf, Santa Barbara
LIKE ALL AMERICAN CITIES, Santa Barbara suffers from sprawl. Yet some sprawl is a damn sight more appealing than other sprawl.
Santa Barbara’s sprawl is heavenly. It’s lush and beautifully landscaped and dotted with massive villas, which peer over the Pacific.
No wonder it has become the hottest destination on the West Coast – a year round retreat, with old-world pedigree. New York has the Hamptons. LA has Santa Barbara.
Leaving the freeway, I quickly passed a sprinkling of antiques and craft shops, a surf shack, a Sotheby’s real estate office, and the Bikini Factory. ‘Hi,’ the place seemed to be saying, ‘we might be rich, and cultured, but we like to have fun too.’
First colonised by industrialists from the Mid-West and the East Coast, as a winter resort, the area is now being inundated by the Hollywood set, who seem to have discovered that popping up the coast for the weekend is a lot easier, safer and more patriotic, than, say, jetting off to the South of France.
Thick with surfers
It was an easy two-hour drive from LA, along the legendary, coast-hugging Highway 1, the sparkling ocean thick with surfers. Compared to smoggy, dysfunctional LA, Santa Barbara hits you in the face with its beauty and grace. I can quite see why the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Kevin Costner, John Cleese, Steve Martin and Rob Lowe have bought homes there.
Lying between the Santa Ynez Mountains, which turn purple at twilight when the Pacific Ocean goes green, Santa Barbara benefits from not just facing south - the only significant stretch of coast between Alaska and Cape Horn to do so - but from a famed Mediterranean climate. It averages 300 sunny days a year and has been known as the American Riviera.
The climate didn’t feel very Mediterranean to me. It felt much more comfortable. While the sun is hot, it’s not always there - May and June can be a bit foggy - and the summer evenings are decidedly cool.
Still, the surrounding mountains do have a certain Cote d’Azur feel to them, in their sheltering, gulley-strewn steepness - except they are markedly less developed.
By the time I hit Cabrillo Boulevard, Santa Barbara’s equivalent of Cannes’ la Croisette, I had already made up my mind that everything here was better and mostly bigger than I’d ever experienced in the stuffy overcrowded Med. The beaches are wide and sandy, all public, and washed by proper rollers. No skinny strips of dirty sand, bagged by ‘exclusive’ hotels here.
If Santa Barbara has a less smart side, it’s down by the sea. This is where people who look a little more like tourists and less like film stars come to play and exercise. I had to dodge the roller-bladers on the boardwalk and the volleyballers on East Beach to eventually find some semblance of calm, down on nearby Butterfly Beach.
Though calm is certainly not what I found on Stearns Wharf – the oldest wooden pier on the West Coast. It might once have been owned by Jimmy Cagney, but like piers the world over it has since become the domain of mad fishermen, palm readers, and greedy gulls.
Brophy Brothers, with a long bar overlooking the yachts and fishing vessels, specialises in beer and oysters. I thought I’d be more sensible and stick to something more solid. Forgetting how large American portions are I ended up with a massive slab of very succulent local wild sea bass, a mountain of coleslaw and a bucket of chips.
Nevertheless, apart from a few visitors to Stearns Wharf, and the odd, obviously retired fisherman, I came to notice that Santa Barbara doesn’t really do fat. Surgically enhanced, sure, but not fat.
At lunch at the ocean front Four Seasons Biltmore a couple of days later (where portions are quite tiny in comparison to those at Brophys) I sat next to a table of eight extra-ordinarily thin women. As far as I could tell everyone had had a face-lift. But this, of course, is California and aesthetics are key.
When a huge earthquake destroyed most of downtown in 1925 an architectural board created stringent guidelines as to how the city was to be rebuilt. The result might be something of a Spanish/Mediterranean pastiche – low rise, whitewashed buildings with red-tiled roofs situated around well tended public gardens – but, under an achingly blue sky, it looked quite stunning to me. And incredibly clean.
It was also very peaceful, with only State Street, incorporating the oldest shopping mall in California, El Paseo, which was built in 1927, showing any signs of bustle. Shopping, unless it’s for wine, or real estate, doesn’t seem to be a major pastime here. Everyone, I got the feeling, has everything already.
However, Santa Barbara County, with over 60 wineries, is being regarded as the next Napa. Fortunately I had the foresight to avoid wine tasting, and Brophy’s and any of the ‘high end’ restaurants, which litter the city, on the day I embarked upon a whale-watching excursion.
The best whale watching area in the world
Between Santa Barbara and what are known as the Channel Islands – a group of islands some 20 miles offshore – is meant to be the best whale-watching water in the world.
That is when it’s calm. It seemed calm enough when I left the shore on a high speed catamaran, but a few miles out to sea it became a case of spot the killer wave, not the killer whale.
Amazingly, we did see a truly huge blue whale, and a couple of humpbacks, but then most of the people on board had their heads buried between their legs. Not surprisingly, most of the locals I met stick to dry land.
Hacienda style
Unless you are very well connected, the best way to sample Santa Barbara high life is to slip into the San Ysidro Ranch. This 110-year-old hacienda style hotel was once owned by the British actor Ronald Coleman.
Set in 500 acres of rolling hillside, with an English rose garden, a pool and a charming pub style bistro, this was where John and Jackie Kennedy spent part of their honeymoon, and where, at midnight, one August, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier were married.
As much as the old guard may like to think of Santa Barbara as a quiet, charming, Californian backwater, it’s clearly always been fabulously glamorous.
