California's Coastal Masterpiece — Cannery Row, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Fisherman's Wharf, and the seafood that made the Central Coast famous
Monterey is a city of extraordinary marine richness — the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary directly offshore is one of the world's most productive ocean ecosystems, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium is consistently ranked among the world's finest. Cannery Row, the sardine-canning district immortalized by John Steinbeck, is lined today with seafood restaurants, wine-tasting rooms, and gallery spaces. Clam chowder in sourdough bowls at Fisherman's Wharf, Dungeness crab, and locally caught Pacific halibut are the food canon. Carmel-by-the-Sea is 4 miles south; the 17-Mile Drive through Pebble…
Monterey was the capital of Alta California under Spanish rule from 1777 and served as the capital of Mexican California until the American conquest in 1846 — making it, technically, the first American capital on the Pacific coast. The Custom House on the waterfront, built in 1827, is California's oldest government building still standing. The sardine canning industry arrived in the early 1900s and at its peak in the 1940s produced over 235,000 tons of canned fish annually, until the sardine population collapsed completely in 1948 — an overfishing catastrophe that Steinbeck saw coming and des…