El Presidio & El Cuartel

Stop on the sidewalk here and look across at the low, plain adobe buildings — thick earthen walls, small windows, none of the flourish of the courthouse. This is El Presidio, and after all the grand architecture, it looks almost disappointingly humble. Which is exactly why it matters.

This is where Santa Barbara actually begins. In 1782, Spain built a fort on this spot — the last of four military presidios up the California coast — and everything you've walked through today radiated out from it. And that small adobe in front of you, called El Cuartel, was finished around 1788. It is the oldest standing building in the entire city, and it's often ranked as the second-oldest surviving building in all of California — older than nearly every "old" thing you've admired so far.

Here's the beautiful irony of the whole tour, standing right here. The truly ancient building on this walk is this modest brown box you could stroll past without a glance. Meanwhile the dazzling Spanish "old town" all around it — the theatres, the courthouse, the arcades — is the young one, built in the 1920s to look the way people imagined this fort's era looked. The real old thing is plain. The pretend old thing is gorgeous. That's Santa Barbara.

There's no need to go in — take it in from here. Then continue a short way south, toward De la Guerra Street, to a grand old adobe home and the shopping courtyard built around it: Casa de la Guerra and El Paseo.