Capitola: The Oldest Resort on the Pacific Coast

The village at the mouth of Soquel Creek was not always painted in pastels. It started as a lumber camp, then a campground, then something more calculated: in eighteen sixty-nine, a man named Frederick Hihn established Camp Capitola here as a summer resort, making it the first community in California founded specifically for that purpose. The first organized beach resort west of the Mississippi, by some accounts, that is still operating.

For the first fifty years, people came by train. The Southern Pacific ran a branch line down to the shore, and the families who arrived each summer would pitch tents along the creek, swim in the bay, and eat at the camp dining halls. It was a democratic pleasure, affordable by the coastal middle class of San Jose and San Francisco, and it filled up every summer.

Then in nineteen twenty-four, a developer named Charles Canfield began building a condominium complex on the bluff above Soquel Creek. He called it the Venetian Court, a row of Mediterranean Revival cottages in ochre and salmon and cream, stacked along the hillside in arches and balconies. The first unit sold in nineteen twenty-five. It was the first condominium beach community in the United States, by legal designation, and the complex became the visual signature of the town, the image that appears on postcards and calendars and, eventually, on every social media post from anyone who has ever stopped here.

The Venetian Court was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-seven. The creek still flows to the sea below it. The pastels are carefully maintained.