Monterey

The Rumsen, one of the Ohlone peoples, lived around the bay for thousands of years, with villages at Point Lobos, Moss Landing and Carmel, and shell middens show that mussels and abalone were central to their diet. Sebastián Vizcaíno named the bay in 1602; Gaspar de Portolá, arriving overland in 1769, failed to recognise it. He returned the next year, built the Presidio, and on 3 June 1770 Junípero Serra founded a mission inside its walls; the mission moved to Carmel in 1771, and its chapel later became the present cathedral. In 1777 Monterey became the capital of the Californias, and all shipments into California by sea later had to pass through the Custom House, begun in 1814.

Monterey stayed the capital under Mexico. In 1846, during the Mexican–American War, Commodore John Sloat raised the American flag over the Custom House and claimed California for the United States, and in 1849 delegates meeting in Colton Hall drafted the state's first constitution in English and Spanish. New England whalers had already left a whalebone pavement, which survives in front of the Old Whaling Station. The Gold Rush then drew much of the population north, and later in the century writers and artists, Robert Louis Stevenson among them, came to the peninsula.

The first sardine cannery opened in 1902. Sicilian and Japanese fishermen supplied the boats, Sicilian, Portuguese, Hispanic and Chinese workers, many of them women, packed the fish, and by the early 1940s more than 30 canneries and reduction plants lined the shore. John Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row appeared in 1945, just as overfishing brought the sardine collapse; the last cannery closed in 1973. The Monterey Bay Aquarium, opened on the site of the Hovden Cannery in 1984, turned the street into the town's main attraction.

Monterey's identity is bound up with the bay. The Monterey Bay Aquarium, its research and its Seafood Watch guide, the marine reserves offshore and the sea otters, seals and passing whales give the town a strong conservation culture. Steinbeck is the town's literary patron, along with his friend the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, whose laboratory still stands on Cannery Row; Stevenson and the poet Robinson Jeffers also lived and wrote in the area.

Music has a distinguished history. The Monterey Jazz Festival, first held in 1958, presented Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday and still fills the county fairgrounds every September, and the same fairgrounds hosted the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, one of the opening events of the Summer of Love. The car is the other passion: Monterey Car Week each August brings auctions, races at Laguna Seca and the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, drawing an estimated 100,000 people in 2024.

The town's Spanish and Mexican past is kept visible through the adobes of the old capital, the Path of History and the Royal Presidio Chapel, and the hillside of Spaghetti Hill is named after its first Italian American residents. The Defense Language Institute and the Naval Postgraduate School bring military students to the town.

About 30,000 people lived in Monterey at the 2020 census, part of a wider peninsula of small towns that includes Pacific Grove, Carmel, Seaside and Marina, with the farm city of Salinas inland. Old Monterey holds the downtown business district and the hillside of Spaghetti Hill, named after its first Italian American residents; New Monterey, behind Cannery Row, is mainly residential; and the Naval Postgraduate School occupies the grounds of a former resort hotel on the east side.

Tourism is the biggest visible industry — the aquarium alone receives around two million visitors a year — but the federal institutions are important employers and strongly associated with the city: the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey teaches foreign languages to members of the armed forces, and the Naval Postgraduate School trains officers. The Middlebury Institute of International Studies and California State University, Monterey Bay add students and staff. The Census Bureau estimated a median household income of about $104,000 in 2023, and housing costs are high.

Life follows the weather and the water: morning fog that often burns off by afternoon, runners and cyclists on the coastal trail, kayaks in the harbour, and summer weekends crowded with visitors from the Bay Area. Winter storms bring landslides that cut Highway 1 to the south, a recurring problem for the communities of Big Sur.

Seafood comes first, as it did long before the canneries: the shell middens around the bay show that mussels and abalone were staples of the Rumsen Ohlone diet. Old Fisherman's Wharf, a wholesale fish market until the 1960s, is now lined with restaurants and fish counters, and fishermen still sell the day's catch near the harbour. The local specialities are sanddabs, a small Pacific flatfish usually served fried, and calamari, a reminder that the last cannery survived into the 1970s by canning squid. The aquarium's Seafood Watch programme, begun in 1999, has made many local restaurants think about where their fish comes from.

Artichokes are the other local signature. Castroville, a few miles up the coast, calls itself the artichoke centre of the world, and artichokes appear on menus all over town — fried, grilled, steamed, in soup or on pizza.

Downtown's Alvarado Street has a mix of restaurants and bars, while the converted canneries of Cannery Row hold seafood restaurants and bars with tables looking over the water.