Lobero Theatre

California's oldest continuously operating theatre — older than the "old" town around it.

Key facts

Original opera house built 1873 by Italian immigrant José Lobero
Billed by the theatre itself as California's oldest continuously operating theatre
Present building is a 1924 Spanish Colonial Revival rebuild by George Washington Smith
A pre-quake showpiece of the "New Spain" movement, reopened a year before the 1925 quake

Narration transcript

This modest building on your left, set back a little from Canon Perdido Street, is the Lobero Theatre — and it may be the most important stop on this walk, because it's the one that catches the whole city in the act.

Here's the claim the Lobero makes, and it's a big one: it's the oldest continuously operating theatre in California. A theatre has stood and performed on this exact spot since 1873, when an Italian immigrant named José Lobero built an opera house here — a genuinely, verifiably old landmark in a downtown full of pretend-old ones.

But now look at it. It's Spanish Colonial Revival — white walls, tile, clean arches — just like the courthouse, just like La Arcada. And here's the twist that makes this stop the key to the tour: this building is a rebuild from 1924. The theatre is from 1873; the look is from the year before the earthquake. Santa Barbara took one of its oldest institutions and re-dressed it in the new invented style — on purpose, as a showpiece — a full year before the quake that would make that style law.

So the Lobero is older than it looks and, at the same time, a costume. Which is the entire idea of this tour standing in one place: in downtown Santa Barbara, "old" is sometimes real, sometimes staged, and often both wearing the same white coat of plaster.

Now walk east along Canon Perdido Street, just a block or so. You're about to reach the actual beginning of the whole city — the fort it grew out of.