97 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.

Which salad dressing became famous at Steve Henson's 1950s guest lodge in the mountains above Santa Barbara?

Ranch took off at Hidden Valley Ranch near San Marcos Pass, where Henson's dinner guests liked the dressing so much they bought jars to take home.

Which Scott O'Dell children's novel was inspired by the Lone Woman of San Nicolas, brought to Santa Barbara in 1853?

Island of the Blue Dolphins retells her 18 years alone on San Nicolas. Nobody in Santa Barbara could understand her language, and she lies buried at the Mission.

In which country did the NBC soap Santa Barbara air from 1992 until 2002, nine years after its US cancellation?

Russia screened the soap from 1992 to 2002, a longer run than its whole life on US television, where NBC dropped it in 1993.

Which annual observance did Senator Gaylord Nelson launch in 1970 after seeing the Santa Barbara oil spill?

Earth Day grew from what Nelson saw out of an aeroplane window: an 800-square-mile slick spreading across the Santa Barbara Channel.

Which future Oscar winner had an early TV role as an alcoholic teenager on the NBC soap Santa Barbara in 1990?

Leonardo DiCaprio was about 15 at the time, and the part earned him a Best Young Actor in a Daytime Series nomination at the Youth in Film Awards.

Which future film star got her break playing heiress Kelly on the NBC soap Santa Barbara from 1984 to 1988?

Robin Wright played Kelly from the age of 18 to 22, collecting several Daytime Emmy nominations and marrying her co-star Dane Witherspoon.

Which pop star built a private amusement park, zoo and railway on his estate near Los Olivos in Santa Barbara County?

Michael Jackson named the place Neverland and gave it a Ferris wheel, a carousel and a steam locomotive called Katherine after his mother.

Which detective comedy starring James Roday and Dulé Hill is set in Santa Barbara but was filmed in British Columbia?

Psych used White Rock, a seaside town in British Columbia, as its California setting, where fake psychic Shawn Spencer consults for the police.

Which 2004 film sends two friends on a wine-tasting road trip through Santa Barbara County before a wedding?

Sideways swayed drinkers as well as critics: sales of Pinot noir, the grape its hero adores, rose 16% in the western United States while Merlot fell.

Which country's emigrants founded Solvang in Santa Barbara County in 1911, seeking a home far from Midwestern winters?

Denmark was their homeland: a group of Danish Americans bought almost 9,000 acres of an old land-grant rancho and opened a school the same year.

Which Spanish priest, founder of California's first missions, blessed the site of Santa Barbara's Presidio in 1782?

Junípero Serra blessed the ground as building began in April 1782. The fort turned out to be the last military outpost Spain built in its New World colonies.

Mission Santa Barbara is the only California mission whose church was built with a matching pair of what?

Bell towers flank its facade, and both had to be demolished and rebuilt between 1950 and 1953 after the concrete foundation began to disintegrate.

Which cut of beef, grilled over red oak coals, is the signature of Santa Barbara County's Santa Maria-style barbecue?

Tri-tip only joined the tradition in the 1950s, when a Santa Maria butcher perfected the triangular cut. Before that the pits held big chunks of top sirloin.

Which Santa Barbara County military base launches satellites south over the ocean into polar orbit?

Vandenberg sent up the world's first polar-orbiting satellite, Discoverer 1, in 1959. A rocket heading south from there crosses no land until Antarctica.

UC Santa Barbara was one of the first four sites linked in 1969 on which forerunner of the internet?

ARPANET began by joining UCLA, a Stanford research lab, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah, so three of its first four computers sat in California.

Which mystery writer set her Kinsey Millhone alphabet novels in Santa Teresa, a thinly fictionalized Santa Barbara?

Sue Grafton lived in Santa Barbara, and Santa Teresa had already stood in for the city in Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer detective novels.

Which future US president spent his 1953 honeymoon at San Ysidro Ranch near Santa Barbara?

John F. Kennedy and his bride Jacqueline stayed at the ranch thirteen years after Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier were married there.

Which rock band, formed in Santa Barbara in 1986, took its name from a Monty Python sketch?

Toad the Wet Sprocket was a joke band in the Python sketch Rock Notes. The real four knew one another from San Marcos High School, just outside the city.

Which volleyball player, raised in Santa Barbara, is the only one with Olympic medals both indoors and on the beach?

Karch Kiraly won indoor gold with the US team in 1984 and 1988, then took gold again in 1996, the first Games to include beach volleyball.

A nearly complete skeleton of which Ice Age animal was found on Santa Rosa Island, off Santa Barbara, in 1994?

Pygmy mammoth bones were already known from the islands, but the skeleton scientists were called to on the northeast coast was the first nearly complete one.

Which Oscar-nominated stage legend, then in her late eighties, played matriarch Minx Lockridge on NBC's Santa Barbara?

Judith Anderson, the sinister Mrs Danvers of Hitchcock's Rebecca, made the city her home for much of her life and died there in 1992, aged 94.

On NBC's Santa Barbara, former nun Mary Duvall died in 1986 when what toppled onto her on a hotel roof?

A giant neon letter C from the hotel's rooftop sign crushed her in the middle of an argument, a soap death strange enough for American Dad to reference years later.

Which actor spent eight years as Cruz Castillo, half of the supercouple Cruz and Eden, on NBC's Santa Barbara?

A Martinez played Cruz from 1984 to 1992 and won a Daytime Emmy, then moved through General Hospital, One Life to Live and Days of Our Lives.

Which actress left the role of Liza Colby on All My Children in 1984 to play Eden on NBC's Santa Barbara?

Marcy Walker earned three Daytime Emmy nominations for lead actress as Eden, then went back to playing Liza on All My Children in 1995.

Which actress, later General Hospital's Alexis Davis, played lawyer Julia Wainwright on the soap Santa Barbara?

Nancy Lee Grahn won a Daytime Emmy for Julia in 1989, played her until 1993, and found her General Hospital character was another headstrong lawyer.

Which General Hospital heartthrob, famous as Frisco Jones, joined NBC's Santa Barbara as Warren Lockridge in 1991?

Jack Wagner stayed until the final episode in 1993, one of several stars hired from other soaps as the original leads were written out.

Which married writing team, former head writers of Guiding Light, created the NBC soap Santa Barbara?

Bridget and Jerome Dobson had soap in the family: her parents created General Hospital, where Bridget began writing scripts in 1969.

NBC launched its soap Santa Barbara on July 30, 1984, while rival ABC was showing which global event?

The Summer Olympics were under way in Los Angeles and filled ABC's schedule, so NBC gave its new daytime serial heavy promotion against them.

Which company's Isla Vista branch, beside UC Santa Barbara, was burned down by rioting students in February 1970?

Bank of America reopened in a temporary building, where student Kevin Moran was killed by police fire that April after putting out another blaze.

Which reclusive copper heiress kept her Santa Barbara estate Bellosguardo staffed for decades without ever visiting?

Huguette Clark never went back after the 1950s, yet staff kept the house ready until she died at 104. Her will left the estate to a new arts foundation.

Which Hawaii-born singer-songwriter and surf filmmaker earned a film studies degree from UC Santa Barbara in 1997?

Jack Johnson directed the surf films Thicker Than Water and The September Sessions before music took over, and went on to top the Billboard 200 four times.

Which dish made Andersen's restaurant in Buellton, Santa Barbara County, a famous Highway 101 stop from 1924?

Pea soup put Andersen's on the map for drivers between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Buellton original closed for redevelopment in January 2024, just short of its 100th anniversary.

Which fruit is celebrated each October at a long-running festival in Carpinteria, on the Santa Barbara County coast?

Avocado dishes and locally made goods fill Carpinteria on the first weekend of October, at a festival whose history goes back to the 1980s.

Which actor, the son of a Hollywood legend, earned his drama degree at UC Santa Barbara in 1968?

Michael Douglas, the eldest son of Kirk Douglas, later became honorary president of the UCSB Alumni Association and supports the campus film and television centre.

Which director filmed the Exodus for his 1923 epic The Ten Commandments on sand dunes in northern Santa Barbara County?

Cecil B. DeMille's vast Egyptian set, with 21 sphinxes and four pharaoh statues, ended up buried under the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes, where much of it remains.

Which actor, born in Santa Barbara in 1962, played Goose in Top Gun and Dr Mark Greene on ER?

Anthony Edwards began acting on stage while growing up in the city, and his years as Dr Greene on ER won him a Golden Globe in 1998.

Which 2009 comedy stars Meryl Streep as a Santa Barbara bakery owner who starts a secret affair with her ex-husband?

It's Complicated is set in the city but was mostly shot in New York, where the heroine's bakery was built inside a hall in Brooklyn's Prospect Park.

Which sheepskin boot brand was bought in 1995 by Deckers, a Santa Barbara County footwear company founded in 1973?

UGG became a household name after the boots appeared on Oprah Winfrey's Favorite Things in 2003. Deckers, based in Goleta, also owns Teva and Hoka.

UC Santa Barbara professor Shuji Nakamura shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing which light source?

The blue LED was the missing piece for white LED lighting: part of its light is turned yellow by a phosphor coating. Nakamura built it at the Japanese firm Nichia in 1993.

Seven US Navy ships of which type ran aground in fog at Honda Point, Santa Barbara County, on one night in 1923?

Destroyers travelling at 20 knots hit the rocks a few miles short of the Santa Barbara Channel, in the largest peacetime loss of US Navy ships.

Which restaurant chain, with 1,117 outlets across 47 states by 1979, began with one Santa Barbara location in 1957?

Sambo's took its name from parts of its founders' names, Sam Battistone and Newell Bohnett. The original outlasted the whole chain and was renamed Chad's in 2020.

Which headland in Santa Barbara County marks the corner where California's coast swings from north-south to east-west?

Point Conception is where the Santa Barbara Channel meets the open ocean, and weather forecasters use it as the dividing line between Southern and Central California.

Which Santa Barbara venue, founded as an opera house in 1873, is California's oldest continuously operating theatre?

The Lobero is named after its founder, José Lobero. His original opera house was replaced in 1924 by the present building, designed by George Washington Smith and Lutah Maria Riggs.

Which actor, TV's Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, later ran a family winery at Los Olivos in Santa Barbara County?

Fess Parker spent his later years as a hotelier and winemaker, and the family business grew to include a small inn in Los Olivos.

Summerland, just east of Santa Barbara, was founded in the 1880s as a colony for followers of which movement?

Spiritualism shaped the town: founder H. L. Williams sold its tiny lots to fellow believers, and the church at its heart had a séance room.

Which actress, General Hospital's scheming Heather Webber, took over the role of Gina on NBC's Santa Barbara in 1985?

Robin Mattson replaced Linda Gibboney that December and played Gina right through to the final episode in 1993, earning Emmy nominations on the way.

Storke Tower, the 175-foot landmark of the UC Santa Barbara campus, was built to house what?

A carillon of 61 bells hangs inside, the heaviest weighing 4,793 pounds, and ten of them chime out the university motto before every hour.

Santa Barbara publisher Thomas Storke won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials exposing which semi-secret organization?

The John Birch Society was the target of what the Pulitzer citation called his forceful editorials. Storke sold the newspaper in 1964.

Which New Deal agency rebuilt Santa Barbara County's La Purísima, California's most completely restored mission?

The Civilian Conservation Corps finished in time for a dedication on December 7, 1941, the very day the United States was pulled into the Second World War.

Which national forest, home to California condor sanctuaries, covers the mountain backcountry behind Santa Barbara?

Los Padres was called Santa Barbara National Forest until 1936, and its Sespe and Sisquoc sanctuaries are managed for the condor.