Carmel

City located in Monterey County, on the Pacific coast. A beautiful Californian corner of Spanish origin where music, art and good surf coexist. The Spanish founded a settlement here in 1797, when San Junípero Serra moved Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo from Monterey. Mission Carmel served as the headquarters of the California mission system, until the Mexican secularization law of 1833, when the area was divided into ranch grants. The settlement was largely abandoned by the American conquest of California in 1848 and remained undeveloped until Santiago J. Duckworth set out to build a summer colony in 1888.

Currently Carmel-by-the-sea or simply Carmel, is one of the most charming towns in California. It has always been a place of inspiration for artists from all over the country since the early 1900s, so much so that it soon became an important headquarters of the Arts and Crafts movement, which reacted to industrialization by creating a cultural center that brought together poets, writers , actors, rising artisans and the most outstanding painters of the moment who taught other painters of the stature of William Merritt Chase or Xavier Martínez, among others.

Part of the charm and tourist interest of Carmel is in its historical past, which has left such outstanding monuments as Mission Carmel. Another part of its charm is due to its urban landscape designed by its own neighbors, mostly specialized in some field of performing arts, who from 1910 They built their houses in this place, always maintaining the aesthetics of “a town inside the forest with views of the white sand beach.” Thus, throughout the Historic Center there are no streetlights or parking meters, the shops and houses, most of which have a rustic aesthetic, do not have numbers, but rather the name of the street is used combined with the geographical address. This makes the distribution of ordinary mail extremely difficult, so citizens pick up their correspondence at the post office.

As a curiosity, one of the reasons that has made this small town so famous in recent years is because the actor and film director Clint Eastwood has been its mayor for some time.