12 Most Hospitable Towns In California
Hospitality is easy to claim and hard to prove. The twelve California towns below can prove it. Each one built, bought back, rebuilt, or gave away something so that people who do not live there would have somewhere to go. A trout hatchery with an open gate. A theater a town refused to let close. A foundry a community bought by passing the hat. None of these places is here for being friendly. They are here because the welcome has an address, and you can go stand in front of it.
Mount Shasta, California
Mount Shasta keeps its spring water where anyone can reach it. This Siskiyou County town sits on the lower flanks of Mount Shasta. A mile north of downtown, the Mt. Shasta Recreation and Parks District runs Mt. Shasta City Park around Big Springs, one of the sources feeding the Upper Sacramento River. A paved path drops to the creek and two footbridges cross it. A viewing patio and benches sit at the spring itself, and nature trails run along Big Springs Creek.
Two more doors stay open nearby on Old Stage Road. The Mt. Shasta Fish Hatchery has operated since 1888. It supplies most of the eggs for the state's trout hatcheries, upwards of 30 million in a year, and the grounds are self-guided every day until midafternoon. Visitors can watch eggs hatch in Building B from mid-March through July. Next door, the volunteer-run Mt. Shasta Sisson Museum asks for a donation and nothing more.
Weaverville, California
Weaverville tends a temple that never stopped being one. The Weaverville Joss House State Historic Park preserves the Temple of the Forest Beneath the Clouds, in the Trinity Alps country west along Highway 299. No older Chinese temple in California has stayed in continuous use. The building is neither a reconstruction nor a diorama. People still worship in it.
What earns the town its place here is what the park does with the site. It opens for public celebrations that anyone may attend, among them Lunar New Year, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Day, and the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival. Inside, the displays hold ceremonial art, mining tools, and weapons carried in the 1854 Tong War.
Weaverville is unincorporated and serves as the seat of Trinity County, which has no incorporated communities and no traffic signals anywhere within it. The historic main street is short. The temple still burns incense for anyone who comes through the door.
Point Arena, California
Point Arena saved a theater that had already been condemned. The Arena Theater, a vaudeville-era playhouse on the Mendocino County coast, was shut down as unsafe in 1995. A nonprofit community group rebuilt it with volunteer labor. A membership-elected board now owns it outright, and it opens on nearly every date the calendar holds.
The same pattern shows up twice more. A nonprofit called the Point Arena Lighthouse Keepers holds and operates the Point Arena Lighthouse. Its current tower opened on September 15, 1908, after the original light of 1870 was lost. Tour tickets, store sales, memberships, and overnight stays in the old keepers' houses pay for the preservation work.
North of town, the Point Arena-Stornetta Unit joined the California Coastal National Monument as its first shoreline addition, by presidential proclamation on March 11, 2014. Roughly 1,665 acres of headland now carry eight miles of marked public path, every mile of it free to walk.
Calistoga, California
Calistoga owns the walls its museum lives in. The Sharpsteen Museum, at the north end of the Napa Valley, runs on what it calls a private-public partnership. The City of Calistoga owns the building and keeps it standing. The nonprofit Sharpsteen Museum Association handles operations, exhibits, and public events. Its entire staff is volunteers.
Ben Sharpsteen, the Disney animator who assembled the collection, wanted the museum reachable by everyone without an entry fee. That intention still governs the front door. A donation is suggested and never required, and the docents welcome guests 363 days a year.
Those docents do more than take a ticket nobody has to buy. They give arriving visitors a short orientation and answer questions for as long as anyone wants to ask. Then they point people toward other historic sites and a good lunch elsewhere in town. A museum that sends its visitors back out to the rest of the valley is not protecting its gate receipts. It does not have any.
Benicia, California
Benicia gave away the building it had just finished for itself. The town on the Solano County shore of the Carquinez Strait had completed a new city hall when the state legislature, unhoused and unhappy, needed somewhere to sit. Benicia handed the structure over. Lawmakers met in it from 1853 to 1854, and no other capitol the state used before it moved inland survives.
The detail that lands inside Benicia Capitol State Historic Park is overhead. The interior pillars were carved from the masts of ships abandoned in the bay during the gold rush. The town furnished its guests out of whatever the harbor had left behind.
The arrangement did not end in 1854. The city itself still collects the fees, staffs public services, and maintains the grounds and restrooms at a park the state owns. Alongside it, the Fischer-Hanlon House reached public hands the same way. The family deeded it to the state in 1968 with its furnishings intact.
Sutter Creek, California
Sutter Creek bought back a factory so the public could get inside it. Knight Foundry, a water-powered foundry and machine shop on Eureka Street in Amador County, sat closed for roughly two decades. Nonprofit after nonprofit failed to raise the purchase price. In late 2016 the owning family agreed to donate the land and buildings and to sell the contents separately.
The city could not cover the rest. So the grassroots Knight Foundry Alliance raised the money in four months, from hundreds of individuals, families, and organizations. The doors reopened on March 4, 2017 for the first time in nearly 20 years, and roughly 1,200 people came through. Volunteers still run almost all of it.
The foundry opens the second and fourth Saturday of every month, year-round. On the second Saturday the forges are lit and sand casting is under way, led by docents. The machine shop turns on water falling more than 400 feet from the ridge above town.
Columbia, California
Columbia leveled a Gold Rush town so that people could get into it. Columbia State Historic Park, off Highway 49 in Tuolumne County, preserves more than 30 brick buildings put up when the diggings were running. Wooden sidewalks and high thresholds are what such places normally hand a visitor.
Here the walkways through the whole district were raised and leveled instead, into accessible boardwalks and building entrances. Doorways were modified with push-button openers where the double doors proved too heavy to manage. Preserving the buildings was the easy half. Making them enterable was the part that took a retrofit.
Guided walks through the district cost nothing. They go daily at 11 a.m. from June 1 to Labor Day, and every Saturday and Sunday through the off season. Costumed proprietors keep the shops. Anyone driving south out of Sutter Creek stays on Highway 49 the whole way here. The Mother Lode road links the two towns without a turn.
San Juan Bautista, California
San Juan Bautista made room for a theater company that had nowhere to land. El Teatro Campesino, the farmworker troupe founded by Luis Valdez, moved to this rural San Benito County town in 1971 and never left. A company born on picket lines chose a place with one main street, and the company outlasted its own founding purpose there.
The arrangement produced something a visitor can attend. On alternating years the company stages La Virgen del Tepeyac and La Pastorela inside the Mission San Juan Bautista, which has held services without interruption since 1797. A working mission lending its nave to a farmworker theater company is not an ordinary municipal accommodation.
The mission fronts San Juan Bautista State Historic Park, whose plaza holds the adobe buildings that have faced the church since the mission's early years. The plaza is open ground, walkable at any hour without a ticket or a gate.
Lone Pine, California
Lone Pine hands its museum parking lot to hikers who never go inside. The Museum of Western Film History stands on Main Street in Inyo County, beneath the eastern wall of the Sierra Nevada. It sets aside long-term spaces between May and September for people climbing Mount Whitney. Those visitors buy no ticket and see no exhibit. The spaces are held for them anyway.
The institution exists because the town went and built it. Residents, local businesses, and a donor couple funded it into being in 2006. The first Lone Pine Film Festival had been held in October 1990, and neither it nor the museum was ever anyone's assignment.
Admission runs on an $8 donation. During festival weekend each October the museum sends out more than 30 guided tours to actual filming sites in the Alabama Hills. It publishes self-guided routes for the remaining months, so anyone can find the rocks without a guide.
Morro Bay, California
Morro Bay residents pushed the state into buying a country club. The Cabrillo Country Club had opened on the San Luis Obispo County shoreline months before the 1929 crash, and its developers went looking for any buyer at all. Townspeople lobbied for the state to take the land as a park instead. Possession transferred in 1934, and the whole 2,700-acre property is public today.
That decision matters more than usual here, because the landmark itself cannot be entered. Climbing Morro Rock is illegal. The 23-million-year-old volcanic plug is a nesting site for peregrine falcons, so the town built the ways to see it instead.
The Morro Bay State Park Museum of Natural History stands high on White's Point with the bay laid out below, and its staff runs hikes and talks. The Heron Rookery Natural Preserve puts great blue herons and egrets in view between February and June. The Marina Peninsula Loop Trail carries a wheelchair its full seven-tenths of a mile.
Tehachapi, California
Tehachapi built its train depot twice. Arson destroyed the first one on June 13, 2008. A town under no obligation to replace a building that had stopped serving trains decades earlier went and replaced it. Crews worked from archival drawings so the reconstruction would match, and the Tehachapi Depot Museum now stands in the Tehachapi Mountains of eastern Kern County where the original did.
The second decision was the more telling one. The museum charges no admission, and unpaid residents run it. The town rebuilt the depot and then declined to make it pay for itself.
Railroad traffic through this pass draws a steady trickle of travelers, and the museum treats their curiosity as something to satisfy rather than something to price. What visitors walk into is a careful copy rather than the original. The town describes it that way instead of trading on the credentials of the building that burned.
Borrego Springs, California
Borrego Springs leaves its best-known attraction unlocked. Galleta Meadows is private land, bought for conservation and left unfenced. The metal sculptures scattered across it stand in open desert with no booth, no posted hours, and no attendant. People pull off the road and walk up to them whenever they arrive, at whatever hour they arrive.
The town also protects something it cannot put a fence around. Borrego Springs became the first International Dark Sky Community in California in 2009. Earning that status meant accepting limits on outdoor lighting, so that the sky over other people's heads would stay dark.
The community sits entirely surrounded by Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the largest state park in California, and that geography explains a good deal. A town with nowhere to sprawl decided instead to be a good host to the desert around it. The sculptures have no gate, the sky charges nothing, and the park around both of them never shuts for the night.
What The Welcome Costs
Every town here spent something. Benicia spent a building. Sutter Creek spent four months of fundraising, and Morro Bay spent the years it took to argue a state purchase into being. Columbia spent whatever it costs to level a nineteenth-century street. None of that shows up in a visitor's afternoon, which is rather the point. The hospitality in these twelve towns was paid for in advance, by people who would not be there to watch anyone use it.
