Anyone who visits Santa Barbara’s beaches soon comes to appreciate their special luminance and their soul-stirring beauty. Visitors and year-round residents often include “beachwalks” in their daily routines. They take time out for a stroll, to the accompaniment of rolling waves and the calls of frolicking shore birds. Some of Santa Barbara’s beaches are broad and sandy, while others skirt past magnificent bluffs and cliffs.
In Chumash times there were many settlements along the area of the present Santa Barbara shoreline, Syukhtun being the most prominent. A stone marker at Santa Barbara’s beachfront today, on Cabrillo Blvd. a block from Stearns Wharf, at the corner of Chapala St., recalls those precolumbian days with some tile illustrations and text. The Syukhtun Story Circle, a 20-foot wide circular mosaic at West Beach, stands as a monument to the Chumash people in the area, and a reminder that they never left.