11 Coolest Small Towns in California for a Summer Vacation

There is a version of California summer that happens entirely in small towns. At the Oceano Dunes, cars still drive straight onto the open sand, the only state park in California that allows it. Up the coast at Jenner, harbor seals haul out where the Russian River meets the sea. Tahoe City has a swimming beach and free concerts on the lake's calm north shore. June Lake holds four stocked trout lakes on a horseshoe loop under granite at 7,654 feet. The other seven round it out, and the tightest schedule any of them follows is golden hour.

Coronado

Coronado is technically a tombolo, a sandy spit connected to the mainland by the Silver Strand. The wide flat beach holds calm, shallow water for swimming all summer. At the south end stands the 1888 Hotel del Coronado, one of the largest wooden buildings in the country. The red-roofed Victorian is where the 1959 comedy "Some Like It Hot" was filmed. It counts 16 US presidents among its past guests. The hotel has been open to the public since day one.

The Coronado Ferry crosses the bay from downtown San Diego and lands near the shops. Orange Avenue is the main commercial street, with boutiques, a small history museum and the Lamb's Players Theatre. On summer Sunday afternoons, the Ferry Landing Marketplace holds free outdoor concerts by the water.

Eureka

Eureka holds the largest concentration of Victorian architecture on the North Coast. Its Old Town district alone preserves more than 150 nineteenth-century buildings from the redwood-lumber boom of the late 1800s. The best-known is the Carson Mansion at 2nd and M streets, a four-story green-and-cream Queen Anne house completed in 1886 for lumber baron William Carson. The building has been the private Ingomar Club since 1950. The public can view it only from the sidewalk out front.

Summer here means fog and cool air, so locals head for the trees and the water. Sequoia Park, just south of downtown, holds a free public garden, a small zoo and an old-growth redwood grove inside the city limits. Humboldt Bay is the main spot for paddlers. Outfitters launch kayak trips into the calm sloughs of the Arcata Marsh. The Lost Coast Trail follows about 25 miles of black-sand beach two hours south, below bluffs too steep for Highway 1 to cross.

Hermosa Beach

Hermosa Beach is one of the oldest surf towns in California. Its flat grid of beach bungalows meets the sand at the end of nearly every street. The Strand, a paved walkway, follows 22 miles of the South Bay shoreline. It carries cruisers, joggers and skaters all summer. At the foot of Pier Avenue, the Hermosa Beach Pier reaches 1,140 feet into the Pacific. The pedestrian blocks behind it hold surf shops, bars and the Comedy & Magic Club, where Jay Leno has tried out Sunday-night sets for more than four decades.

The town holds around 19,000 people on 1.4 square miles, one of the densest beach communities in Los Angeles County. Strict zoning has left it low-rise and walkable. Manhattan Beach, the next pier town north, hosts the Manhattan Beach Open volleyball tournament every August. Back on Pier Avenue, the Hook & Plow serves farm-to-table seafood. Palmilla a few doors down specializes in mole and tequila.

Jenner

Jenner is barely a village, about 122 people where the Russian River meets the Pacific along the Sonoma Coast. The harbor seal colony hauls out on Goat Rock Beach across the river mouth. It is one of the more dependable spots for seeing marine mammals in Northern California. Pupping season peaks in spring and early summer. A no-disturbance buffer along the sand gives the newborns room.

Sonoma Coast State Park includes 17 miles of headlands and pocket beaches along Highway 1, with wildflowers lingering into June. Café Aquatica pours coffee and books live music on a back patio over the water. It is about the only gathering spot in town. The fog is the summer trade-off here. It can hold the village under 70 degrees even in July, so a layer helps.

June Lake

June Lake is a half-mile of Sierra town, about 600 full-time residents along Highway 158. Summer here centers on fishing. A 16-mile horseshoe byway links four alpine lakes in a glacial basin at 7,654 feet. The state stocks them with rainbow trout that bring fishing families from across California. Carson Peak rises to 10,909 feet right above the village, a granite wall above the basin.

The town also serves as a winter base for the June Mountain ski area. July and August center on the water and the high passes. Mammoth Lakes, the larger resort town, is about 15 miles south on Highway 395. Yosemite National Park is 45 miles west over the Sierra crest at Tioga Pass. The pass opens only between late spring and mid-fall, once the snow clears Tioga Road.

Pacific Grove

Pacific Grove wraps the tip of the Monterey Peninsula just north of Carmel. In summer most of it happens along the water. Lovers Point Park is the center of that, a sheltered cove with calm swimming, kayak rentals and a grassy bluff for picnics. The paved Recreational Trail traces four miles of shoreline out to Asilomar State Beach. Point Pinos Lighthouse, lit in 1855 and still working, is the oldest continuously operating lighthouse on the West Coast.

The town goes by Butterfly Town USA, though the butterflies are a cool-season sight. Tens of thousands of monarchs roost in the Monarch Grove Sanctuary from about October into February. Pacific Grove takes them so seriously that bothering one carries a $1,000 fine. Come summer the butterflies are gone, but the symbol remains on the awnings and street signs. A late-July lights festival at Lovers Point brings out evening crowds.

Pismo Beach

Pismo Beach is a long flat stretch of the Central Coast, backed by a strip of surf shops and seafood joints. The rebuilt Pismo Beach Pier reaches about 1,200 feet over the water. It is busy with anglers and evening crowds all season. A block off the sand on Cypress Street, Esteem Surf Co. is both a surf school and a coffee stop. It offers group and private lessons for first-timers through the warm months.

Just south of the pier lies the Oceano Dunes, the only California state park that still lets street-legal vehicles drive onto the sand. Access has tightened in recent years to protect nesting shorebirds. Even without a 4x4, local stables offer horseback rides along the beach, and kayakers reach the sea caves below Dinosaur Caves Park at high tide. The bluff-top park itself has a playground and picnic lawns above the harbor.

San Juan Capistrano

Mission San Juan Capistrano is the town's founding site. Its gardens and adobe courtyards make a cool place to walk on a summer morning before the heat climbs. Father Junípero Serra founded it on November 1, 1776, the seventh of California's 21 Spanish missions. The Great Stone Church behind the gardens went up in 1806 and collapsed in the earthquake of December 8, 1812. The quake killed about 40 worshippers at morning Mass. Its ruins remain on the grounds today.

The mission still hosts the cliff swallows, which folklore says return each year around March 19. Development has scattered the flock in recent years. Two blocks west, the Los Rios Historic District is one of the oldest residential streets in California. The Rios and Montañez adobes have stood on their original lots since the 1790s. The 1894 Capistrano Depot is still a working Amtrak Pacific Surfliner stop, with a restaurant inside the old station house.

Sausalito

Sausalito stands at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge, a hillside town of about 7,300. It is a short summer ferry ride from San Francisco. The town is best known for its houseboat community, around 400 floating homes moored along Waldo Point and Galilee Harbor. The fleet began as a postwar commune that took over surplus barges from the old Marinship shipyard. The docks and slips remain open to walk today.

Up on the headlands, Battery Spencer overlooks the bridge towers from close range. Its World War II gun battery is still in place. The Bay Area Discovery Museum at Fort Baker is a hands-on play space for families at the foot of the bridge. A ten-minute drive into the Marin Headlands reaches Rodeo Beach, a dark-pebble crescent with a lagoon. Harbor seals rest there and the surf breaks year-round.

Sonoma

The Sonoma Plaza is eight acres of lawns, a duck pond and two playgrounds, the largest town plaza in California. It was the site of the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt that briefly created the California Republic. The visitor center occupies the 1913 Carnegie Library on the east side. On the northeast corner stands the Sonoma Mission, founded in 1823. It was the last and northernmost of the 21 California missions, the only one established under Mexican rule.

The wine country spreads out from the plaza, with hundreds of tasting rooms across Sonoma County. Fees tend to come in under Napa's. Buena Vista Winery, operating since 1857, is often called California's oldest commercial winery still in business. Away from the wineries, Vella Cheese Company has made its dry jack on 2nd Street East since 1931. The Sonoma Overlook Trail climbs three miles up Schocken Hill to a view over the valley.

Tahoe City

Tahoe City spreads along the northwest shore of Lake Tahoe, right where the Truckee River drains out. The river is the lake's only outlet and the start of every river-rafting trip downstream. Fanny Bridge over the dam takes its name from the row of backsides bent over the rail to watch the trout in the clear water below. In the middle of town, Commons Beach has a sandy swimming area, free summer concerts and kayak rentals. It is on the calm north end of the second-deepest lake in the country.

About eight miles north, Olympic Valley hosted the 1960 Winter Olympics. Its ski resort carried the Squaw Valley name until 2021. The rename to Palisades Tahoe came in consultation with the local Washoe Tribe. The original Olympic torch and cauldron still stand at the base. About 20 miles south on Highway 89, the Eagle Falls trail at Inspiration Point drops to the shore of Emerald Bay.

The Summer Version Of California

The summer crowds did not make these towns. Eureka was a working lumber port, and its Victorians came later, paid for with redwood money. Sonoma was a mission town first, in 1823, and a wine town long after. The beach towns earned it one wave at a time. None of this was staged for a season. It was here first, and summer is just when the rest of California turns up.