Santa Barbara Week Four

"Viva La Fiesta!"

Our last week here in Santa Barbara kicked off with a bang. For the past 94 years, the town has celebrated its Spanish heritage and history with the Old Spanish Days Fiesta. One of the main events of the five-day festival is the Desfile Histórico (historical parade) which features over 600 horses. The parade started just around the corner from our apartment, so we went to check it out.

Horse riders in traditional costumes

Mariachis

Flamenco dancers

Santa Barbara on a horse-drawn float

We went to the Mercado de la Guerra a couple of times to enjoy some food (mmmm....churros!) and live music.

We also learned about the tradition of cascarónes. These are hollowed out eggs that are colorfully decorated and filled with confetti. Some are just dyed a single color, but many of them are miniature works of art.

Photo courtesy of Santa Barbara Independent

The fun thing to do is to go around breaking the shells (cascarón is the Spanish word for shell) over unsuspecting people's heads. We were sitting next to a family at one of the Fiesta events and their cute little boy about two years old was very excited to break one over my head, shouting "Viva La Fiesta!". Very fun! As you can imagine, the city spends several days sweeping up confetti after the festival...

We also took some time over the weekend to tour the gorgeous Santa Barbara Courthouse building, which is modeled after a Spanish-style castillo and has a beautiful Mural Room. Weddings are often held here.

The clock tower of the Courthouse offers 360-degree views of the entire city and surrounding mountains.

We managed to keep quite busy this week! We also went to Stearns Wharf...

...visited the Sea Center...

...watched the locals lounge on the beach …

... and saw the largest ficus tree in the US, a Moreton Bay Fig tree. This is just a block from our apartment and was planted in the late 1870's.

It's been a lovely (and relatively cool) month here in Santa Barbara. We will certainly miss it once we are back in the summer heat of Arizona!

Santa Barbara Week Three

Probably the main tourist attraction in the area is the Santa Barbara Mission. The Spanish founded a series of 21 missions all along the California coastline, and Santa Barbara's was the tenth -- established in 1786 by the Franciscan order. We took a guided tour on Saturday, which gave us a lot more insight than if we had just wandered the grounds on our own. The church itself is built more like a Greco-Roman temple than a contemporary Catholic cathedral because at the time the missionaries copied the design out of a book by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius.

For anyone who read "Island of the Blue Dolphins" back in grade school, that book was based on a true story about a Chumash woman who was accidentally left behind on one of the Channel Islands when the missionaries evacuated the rest of her tribe. She lived alone, Robinson Crusoe-style, for 18 years until she was "rescued" and brought to Santa Barbara. She was the last of her tribe -- all the others had died in the interim, mostly due to catching European diseases. She died just seven weeks later, having contracted dysentary, and is buried in an unmarked grave in the Mission churchyard.

We got to Santa Barbara a few months too late for the I Madonnari art festival, which was held at the end of May. Street painters create works of art in chalk on the Mission's entry plaza. Luckily the pastel chalk they use lasts a long time and Santa Barbara doesn't get much rain, so we were able to see the remnants of the artworks. I'm sure the colors are much more vivid when fresh.

After visiting the Mission, we drove up into the surrounding hills to have lunch at the Cold Spring Tavern. This used to be a stagecoach stop on the San Marcos Pass - the tavern building dates back to 1886. On weekends they have live music, and the bluegrass band that was playing when we were there (the Salt Martians) was really good.

On Sunday we took a ferry out to the Channel Islands National Park. It's one of the few US National Parks that you can't get to by car. The park consists of five isolated islands and the surrounding water which is a marine sanctuary. (Other Channel Islands, like Catalina Island near Los Angeles, aren't part of the National Park). We only had time to go to one of the islands, Santa Cruz.

We had booked a sea cave kayaking tour through Santa Barbara Adventure Company, and this was a great way to explore the island and keep cool at the same time.

For three and a half hours we paddled our hearts out, exploring a whole bunch of caves and even seeing a sea lion briefly, before it dove below the surface. But the caves were really the highlight.

After kayaking we had a little time to explore the island itself. We were actually glad we'd booked kayaks instead of hiking -- the islands are really dry, and the midday sun in August is hot. Besides, the main thing I really wanted to see on land were the Channel Island foxes, and we saw plenty of them just hanging out in the picnic areas, no need to hike at all!

Each of the islands has its own unique subspecies of fox. They are about the size of a large housecat and don't seem to have much fear of people. During the early 2000's the population rapidly declined due to predation by Golden Eagles. In 2004 there were only about 100 wild foxes on the island of Santa Cruz, and they were listed as "critically endangered". After successful intervention the fox population on Santa Cruz has made a comeback and there are now more than 1700 foxes living on the island. It's nice to hear a conservation success story for a change!