47 Fun Facts About Santa Barbara

Santa Barbara's Mediterranean climate and south-facing coastline have earned it what nickname?

Santa Barbara is marketed as the American Riviera; its east-west coastline faces south and is backed by mountains, echoing the sheltered, sunny shore of the French Riviera.

Which mountain range rises steeply right behind Santa Barbara?

The Santa Ynez Mountains run east to west, so the city at their foot faces south across the water and sits squeezed between steep slopes and the sea.

Which Native people had villages along the Santa Barbara shore long before the Spanish arrived?

The Chumash traded between the mainland and the Channel Islands in tomols, seagoing canoes built from redwood planks and sealed with pine pitch and natural tar.

Which explorer, sailing for Spain, led the first European ships up the Santa Barbara Channel in 1542?

Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo met the coast's villagers that October but never made it home; he died on the voyage in January 1543, and his crew pushed on north without him.

Which religious order founded Mission Santa Barbara in 1786 and has never left?

The Franciscans never left Mission Santa Barbara, even after Mexico took the mission lands in the 1830s, so friars and novices still live beside an archive of records from across the mission chain.

By what nickname is Mission Santa Barbara known?

Mission Santa Barbara is called the Queen of the Missions; after the 1812 earthquake wrecked its adobe church, the friars rebuilt in stone, and it is now the only California mission with twin bell towers.

Which American officer's battalion took Santa Barbara without bloodshed on 27 December 1846?

John C. Frémont's California Battalion crossed the rain-soaked San Marcos Pass and entered Santa Barbara unopposed on 27 December 1846; the town formally became American with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Why do some downtown Santa Barbara intersections have awkward doglegs?

The 1851 surveyor, Salisbury Haley, botched the block measurements, so some streets miss each other where his errors piled up; his chain is said to have been patched with stretchy rawhide.

Stearns Wharf, built in 1872, was named after a local businessman in which trade?

Lumber was John Peck Stearns's business; he ran a yard at the foot of State Street and built the long wharf in 1872 so ocean-going ships could tie up there even at low tide.

Which president visited Santa Barbara in 1891, the first sitting president to do so?

Benjamin Harrison came through in April 1891 and Santa Barbara threw him a floral parade, with residents turned out in Spanish-style costume; the railroad had reached town only four years before.

The Summerland Oil Field, east of Santa Barbara, is widely credited with what distinction?

Summerland gets credit for the world's first offshore oil drilling because in 1896 drillers followed the field out to sea, sinking wells from piers built over the Pacific; earlier over-water wells stood in lakes.

Which silent-film studio, the California arm of a Chicago company, ran a large lot on Mission Street in Santa Barbara?

Flying A Studios once made Santa Barbara a film town to rival Hollywood: the Chicago company's lot turned out hundreds of silent films from 1912, until its top people left for Los Angeles around 1920.

Which aerospace giant is named after two brothers who built seaplanes in a Santa Barbara garage from 1916?

Lockheed is how Allan and Malcolm Loughead respelled a surname people kept mangling; from 1916 they built seaplanes in a garage on lower State Street and launched their big F-1 flying boat off the waterfront in 1918.

Which style did Santa Barbara rebuild in after its 1925 earthquake?

Spanish Colonial won out because the Community Arts Association had pushed the style for years, so when the quake flattened much of State Street its members were ready to steer the rebuilding toward a single look.

Which Santa Barbara public building, finished in 1929, fills a whole downtown block and is topped by a clock tower?

The County Courthouse replaced one the 1925 earthquake wrecked, and it ran far over budget; a lucky oil strike just up the coast in 1928 brought in the tax money that covered the difference.

Which downtown theater, built in 1924 and restored in 2008, is the Santa Barbara Symphony's home?

The Granada Theatre opened in 1924 inside an eight-storey block billed as Santa Barbara's only skyscraper; the 2008 rebuild gave the Symphony the wider stage opening and better acoustics it had asked for before moving in.

Which oil field near Santa Barbara did a Japanese submarine shell in February 1942?

Ellwood came under fire from the deck gun of the submarine I-17 at dusk on 23 February 1942; the shells did little more than damage a pier and a derrick, but the raid set off invasion fears along the whole West Coast.

The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill began with a blowout on Platform A, run by which company?

Union Oil's crew was pulling out the drill bit on 28 January 1969 when the well blew out; the oil that fouled the channel and its beaches for months helped inspire the first Earth Day, held in April 1970.

Outraged Santa Barbara locals answered the 1969 oil spill by forming a group with which acronym?

GOO stood for Get Oil Out; formed within days of the blowout, it ran a petition to clear the rigs from the channel and mailed little flasks of oil scooped off the beach to politicians.

Which Santa Barbara festival, founded in 1924, is held every August?

Fiesta, officially Old Spanish Days, began in August 1924 as a party for the opening of the rebuilt Lobero Theatre; the businessmen who organized it wanted an annual event that would draw visitors.

Which rule applies to every entry in Santa Barbara's Summer Solstice Parade?

No written words or banners, and no logos or engines either, so every float is pushed or pulled by people; what began in 1974 as a local mime's birthday party has grown into one of the county's biggest events.

The I Madonnari festival, held each Memorial Day weekend at Santa Barbara's Mission, features what kind of art?

Chalk drawings on asphalt fill the plaza because each square is sold to a sponsor: Kathy Koury began the festival in 1987 to fund arts teaching in county schools, borrowing the idea from a village in northern Italy.

Santa Barbara's giant Moreton Bay fig grew from a seedling given in 1876 by whom?

An Australian seaman gave the seedling to a local girl in 1876; she planted it on State Street, and after she left, her friend moved it in 1877 to its present spot beside what is now the Amtrak station.

The Santa Barbara Bowl's original 1936 stage, undermined by a flood within a few years, could do what?

It could revolve: the Santa Barbara Bowl was built in 1936 to stage the pageant of the city's summer festival, but floodwater wrecked the turning stage within a few years and its replacement stayed fixed.

Which former warehouse district by Santa Barbara's waterfront is now known for wine-tasting rooms and breweries?

The Funk Zone sits in old industrial buildings between Highway 101 and the beach: artists covered the warehouses in murals, and winemakers and brewers turned them into the tasting rooms that draw the crowds today.

What is the mascot of the University of California, Santa Barbara?

The Gaucho replaced the Roadrunner in a student vote in the mid-1930s; the usual story is that women students, taken with Douglas Fairbanks in the 1927 film The Gaucho, led the push.

Which kind of surplus military base did UC Santa Barbara take over for its seaside campus?

A wartime Marine air station trained Pacific-bound squadrons on the Goleta mesa from 1942 to 1946; when the college moved out there in 1954 it had two new buildings, and everything else, dormitories included, was the Marines' old barracks.

Rancho del Cielo, in the mountains above Santa Barbara, was the vacation retreat of which president?

Ronald Reagan did much of the ranch work himself, fence-building included; he hosted Queen Elizabeth II there in 1983 and later welcomed Mikhail Gorbachev as well.

Which Channel Island, visible from Santa Barbara, is the largest island in California?

Santa Cruz Island is California's largest island at about 96 square miles; feral pigs left over from its ranching days drew golden eagles that nearly wiped out its cat-sized native fox, until both pigs and eagles were cleared off.

Which unincorporated community between Santa Barbara and Summerland is known for its celebrity estates?

Montecito was discovered around 1890 by well-to-do Easterners, who built winter estates there for the mild climate; it has never become a city, so the county still runs it.

Which pop star was born in Santa Barbara in 1984 to two Pentecostal pastors?

Katy Perry grew up in a home where non-religious music was off limits, so she started out in gospel and released a Christian album as Katy Hudson; she later took her mother's maiden name to avoid being mixed up with the actress Kate Hudson.

The 1980s NBC soap opera Santa Barbara followed which wealthy family?

The Capwells' saga ran on NBC from 1984 until 1993; in Russia, where the soap arrived in January 1992 as the first American one on television, it played for ten years, longer than its whole run at home.

Which surfing documentary by Bruce Brown, who later settled on a ranch near Santa Barbara, is credited with taking the sport mainstream?

The Endless Summer was turned down by Hollywood distributors, so Brown rented a cinema in Wichita, Kansas, in midwinter to prove that even landlocked crowds would queue for surfing; they did, and a New York run followed.

Which two Amtrak routes stop at Santa Barbara's State Street station?

The Surfliner runs San Diego to San Luis Obispo; the Coast Starlight goes all the way from Los Angeles to Seattle.

Until 1991, Santa Barbara had Highway 101's last what between Los Angeles and San Francisco?

Traffic lights, four of them, stopped Highway 101 in the middle of town; local businesses liked how they nudged travellers off the road to eat and shop, which helps explain why the last one did not come down until November 1991.

What is the local name for the hot, dry winds that pour down the mountains behind Santa Barbara toward the sea?

Sundowners are generally said to be named for their timing: they tend to start near sunset, when hot air spills down the slopes behind the city. One of the worst drove the 1990 Painted Cave Fire, which burned more than 400 homes.

Which 2017 wildfire burned nearly 282,000 acres across Santa Barbara and Ventura counties?

The Thomas Fire took its name from Thomas Aquinas College, the small Catholic campus near Santa Paula where it broke out on 4 December 2017; when it was finally contained in January it was the largest wildfire California had recorded.

How can the public visit Ganna Walska Lotusland, the 37-acre estate garden just outside Santa Barbara?

By reservation only: Lotusland sits among private homes, and a county permit caps how many visitors it may admit. Ganna Walska, a Polish-born singer, bought the estate in 1941 and spent four decades planting it.

The Santa Barbara Zoo, opened in 1963 beside the ocean, was long known for a giraffe with what unusual feature?

A crooked neck made Gemina one of the zoo's best-known animals; born with a straight one in 1986, she developed the kink when young, never seemed troubled by it and lived to 21, which the zoo called an achievement for a giraffe.

Santa Barbara's city council once voted to cap what at about 85,000?

Residents were the target: the council rezoned so the city could never house many more than 85,000. Fast growth stopped, but housing costs climbed, and many who work in the city now commute in.

Which explorer gave the name 'Santa Barbara' to the channel and one of the islands in 1602?

Sebastián Vizcaíno sailed into the channel in early December 1602, around the feast day of Saint Barbara, and named it for her; the presidio and the mission founded there in the 1780s took over the name.

Which budget lodging chain was started in Santa Barbara in 1962?

Motel 6 was the idea of two local building contractors, who worked out that $6 a night would cover the building, the land lease and the cleaning, and put the price in the name; the first one opened in Santa Barbara in 1962.

Which McDonald's item did Santa Barbara franchisee Herb Peterson invent in the early 1970s?

The Egg McMuffin was Peterson's attempt at an eggs Benedict you could eat with your hands: he had a Teflon-coated ring made to cook the egg round on the grill, then took the result to show Ray Kroc.

Santa Barbara's Arlington Theatre has an auditorium built to look like what?

A village plaza under the stars: the side walls are built out as houses with balconies and stairways, and the ceiling twinkles like a night sky. The 1931 cinema stands where the Arlington Hotel stood until the 1925 earthquake wrecked it.

Which copy-shop chain did Paul Orfalea start in 1970 in a tiny rented space beside the UC Santa Barbara campus?

Kinko's was the nickname friends gave Orfalea for his curly hair. His shop was so cramped that when it filled up he wheeled the copier out onto the sidewalk; he grew by taking fellow students as partners beside other big campuses.

Santa Barbara's city limits run miles under the Pacific to reach what?

The airport sits miles west of the rest of the city, and a city could annex only land that touched it; so in 1961 Santa Barbara claimed a ribbon of ocean up the coast to reach it, a loophole the state then closed.

Which November 2008 wildfire destroyed about 210 homes in the foothills above Santa Barbara?

The Tea Fire began at the Tea Gardens, a hillside folly laid out in 1916 for a wealthy couple's tea parties and long left to trespassers; authorities believe wind rekindled a bonfire that college students had lit there the night before.