San Simeon
A whaling cove, a family cattle ranch, and the pier where Europe was unloaded one crate at a time.
The bay
San Simeon Bay sheltered Portuguese shore-whaling crews in the 1860s, then a ranch landing with a general store — Sebastian’s, still standing — and a pier. It is the only good anchorage for miles on a coast that mostly says no to boats.
The ranch
George Hearst, flush with mining money, began buying the surrounding ranchos in 1865 and folded them into a working cattle ranch that grew toward a quarter-million acres. His son’s childhood camping trips on its highest hill are the origin story of everything in this file: the boy liked the view, and sixty years later the boy could afford to act on it. See Hearst Castle.
The warehouses
Through the 1920s the pier and the big corrugated warehouses beside it were the intake valve for Hearst’s collecting: crated ceilings, cloisters, marbles and armor landed by coastal steamer, logged, and hauled thirteen hundred feet up the hill — or not, in which case they simply stayed, warehoused art in a cow town. Julia Morgan designed the warehouses too. Some crates were still unopened when the state took inventory.
Today
The village serves the castle tours; the ranch, still owned by the Hearst Corporation, runs cattle under one of the largest conservation easements in California, signed in 2005, which keeps eighteen miles of coastline unbuilt. North up Highway 1, elephant seals pile on the beaches at Piedras Blancas. On the golden slopes east of the road, if the light is right, zebras.