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UNITED STATES | Monterey, California Travel Guide
Thursday, November 28, 2024
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Carmel
Typical storybook house in Carmel, California (cc)
Photo: Egil
Carmel
Carmel is a small, rural, gentrified and stunningly beautiful town, with the charm and gentility of an English village. It is less than one mile square, and situated on a splendid, forested coastal slope at the southern tip of the Monterey Peninsula—at the head of Carmel Bay. It is renowned first and foremost for its superb shopping district, where people from all over the country go—just to shop! In it, within some four square blocks, are clustered an astonishing 150-plus shops and more than 60 art galleries, not to mention at least 60 restaurants, featuring almost every known cuisine! The variety in the shopping is just as amazing: here you can buy everything from Gucci fashionwear to African tribal masks, from Charles Wysocki oils to Ansel Adams composites, from safari clothing to fine furs, from imported china and Wedgewood crystal to vegetable-dye Tibetan rugs and handcrafted, south-of-the-border pottery. Prices are accordingly varied: from modest to mind-boggling. But even more than the shopping possibilities, it is the shopping district itself that is most remarkable—rural, wooded and utterly charming, with shops tucked away among age-old shade trees that are really part of an urban forest that requires four full-time city employees to maintain—a situation that owes something to a 1916 ordinance, banning the cutting of trees.
Exploring Carmel
In Carmel, try to visit the Hog’s Breath Inn, an American-style restaurant with a rustic courtyard with a huge fireplace, located on Carlos Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues. Formerly co-owned by actor-director (and one-time Carmel mayor) Clint Eastwood, the Hog's Breath menu features such Eastwood-associated entrees as the "Dirty Harry Burger," "Mysterious Misty" and "Eiger Sandwich."
Also of interest, at the bottom of Ocean Avenue, Carmel’s main street, is Carmel Beach, with its white sand tumbling down to the ocean. Nearby, too, is the picturesque, native- stone Tor House, once the home of California poet Robinson Jeffers, who built it with his own hands between 1918 and 1930.
Also, on the periphery of Carmel, on a small rise overlooking the Carmel River, is the Carmel Mission— Basilica San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmelo—originally built in 1770. There’s a delightful courtyard at the mission, filled with California poppies and other flowers, and a museum housing mission relics that include the original silver altar brought over from Baja California by Father Junipero Serra, founder of the mission. Fathers Serra and Lasuen, each of whom founded nine California missions, are buried here.
Last updated December 26, 2010
Posted in United States | Monterey
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