After the hustle of LA and San Francisco, the four hundred miles of coastline in between - the central coast - is a welcome respite, sparsely populated outside the few medium-sized cities and lined by clean sandy beaches. It is at its most dramatic along Big Sur , one of the most rugged, savagely beautiful stretches of coastline in the world, where the brooding Santa Lucia Mountains rise steeply out of the thundering Pacific surf. The two largest towns are poles apart: Santa Barbara in the south is a wealthy resort colony, full of old and new money, while Santa Cruz to the north is a coastal town redolent of the Sixties - where the local collegians are officially known as the "Banana Slugs." In between, languorous San Luis Obispo makes a good base for visiting Hearst Castle , the hilltop palace of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, and the inspiration for the Xanadu pleasure palace in the film Citizen Kane .

Almost all of the towns grew up around Spanish missions , each a long day's walk from the next, and once enclosed within thick walls to prevent Native American attack. Monterey , a hundred miles south of San Francisco, was California's capital under Spain and Mexico, and still has attractive early-nineteenth-century architecture.

Amtrak's Coast Starlight   train runs along the coast up to San Luis Obispo before cutting inland north to San Francisco and up to Seattle; Greyhound buses stop at most of the towns, especially along the main highway, US-101.

Central coast

• Central coast

Explore Central coast

• Big Sur coast
• Hearst Castle
• Monterey Peninsula
• San Luis Obispo
• Santa Barbara
• Santa Cruz

California cities


All U.S. city guides