Many Californias: From Mission Bells to Malibu. Field Notes from the Road - Episode 1.

Monterey → La Purísima → Solvang → Santa Barbara → Malibu

Kirill Oleshkevich

9/17/20268 min read

Monterey → La Purísima → Solvang → Santa Barbara → Malibu

I originally planned this road trip for one very specific reason: Santa Barbara. Not because I had studied the city's architecture. Not because of the beaches. Not even because of the famous mission. I wanted to see Santa Barbara because, like many people who grew up in Russia in the 1990s, I had already been there hundreds of times through television.

The American soap opera Santa Barbara began airing on Russian television in January 1992 and continued, with interruptions, for roughly a decade. It became one of the defining American television imports of the early post-Soviet period. For a child watching television thousands of miles away, California looked almost unreal. Palm trees. Large houses. Arches. Sunshine. People whose problems somehow unfolded against permanently beautiful backgrounds.

So years later, living in California myself, there was something irresistible about finally driving south to see the place whose name had once sounded almost fictional. But while building the route, other stops appeared. A Danish town in the middle of California. A remarkably preserved Spanish mission. Another mission in Santa Barbara. And, eventually, Malibu. I thought I was driving to one California. Instead, over a few days, I encountered several.

The route south passes through a landscape whose history is much older than its current tourist identities. One of the places that surprised me most was La Purísima Mission State Historic Park, near Lompoc.

I had visited California missions before, including Carmel Mission. But La Purísima felt completely different. It did not feel primarily like a church. And it did not feel like a conventional museum. It felt like entering a reconstructed environment. Rooms. Furniture. Workspaces. Courtyards. Objects. Agricultural land. The scale of the complex allows you to move through it rather than simply look at it. And that makes its history unusually tangible.

La Purísima was founded in 1787 as the eleventh of California's 21 Franciscan missions. The original complex was severely damaged in the earthquake of 1812 and subsequently rebuilt at its present location beginning in 1813. After Mexican secularization in 1834, the site deteriorated for decades. In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps undertook a major archaeological and reconstruction project there; California State Parks describes it today as the only example in the state of a completely restored Spanish mission complex.

That twentieth-century restoration is crucial to understanding why the place feels so immersive. You are not simply looking at a surviving church surrounded by a modern city. You can walk through something resembling an entire mission landscape. For me, that was fascinating. But immersion also makes it especially important not to romanticize what the mission system represented.

The California missions were instruments of Spanish colonial expansion and religious conversion. At La Purísima, the history is inseparable from the Chumash people. California State Parks notes that by 1804 more than 1,500 Chumash who had been removed from their lands were living and laboring at the mission. They constructed buildings, raised livestock, farmed, and produced goods including leather, candles, and soap. European diseases devastated the population, while mission agriculture transformed the surrounding environment. In 1824, La Purísima became one of the centers of the Chumash revolt that spread through several regional missions.

That history creates an important tension. The rooms are beautiful to explore. The restored objects make the past feel close. You can stand inside a space and think: People actually lived here two centuries ago. These were the kinds of objects they touched. These were their rooms.

But historical immersion is valuable precisely when it makes the past more complicated, not when it turns it into decoration. From the perspective of experience design, La Purísima is powerful because it allows the visitor to imagine daily life. From the perspective of history, the next question must always be: Whose daily life? Under what conditions? That makes the experience much richer than nostalgia.

Having previously visited Carmel Mission, I eventually realized that I had experienced three California missions in three quite different ways. Carmel felt most strongly connected to religious continuity. Mission San Carlos Borromeo was founded in 1771 and remains an active Catholic parish; Junípero Serra, who made Carmel his headquarters, is buried inside the basilica.

La Purísima, by contrast, gave me the strongest sense of historical immersion. It is the place where I most easily imagined the everyday mechanics of mission life. And then came Old Mission Santa Barbara. That experience was different again. Santa Barbara felt more monumental. More formal. More visually polished. Almost more museum-like. And, inevitably, there were the arches.

For somebody whose childhood image of the words Santa Barbara came from television, walking through those arcades produced a strange little moment of recognition. Of course, I understood that I was not literally walking through the television series. But childhood visual memory is not particularly interested in such distinctions. Sometimes an arch is enough.

Old Mission Santa Barbara was founded in 1786, the tenth of California's 21 missions. The present stone church dates to 1820, replacing earlier adobe structures damaged by the 1812 earthquake. It is also the only one of the 21 California missions that has remained continuously under Franciscan guidance since its founding. The building has an undeniable theatrical quality. Twin towers. A broad façade. Stone walls. Gardens. Arcades. Museum rooms containing objects that bring the nineteenth century unexpectedly close.

Again, I found myself fascinated by something very simple: these things survived people. A chair. A tool. A religious object. A room. We speak about two hundred years historically as if it were an abstraction. Then you stand in front of something somebody actually used two centuries ago and the distance suddenly contracts. That is one of the things museums can do better than almost any digital medium. They restore scale to time. What fascinated me after the visit was learning that the visual identity of modern Santa Barbara is not simply the untouched survival of Spanish California. It is partly a deliberate twentieth-century construction.

A major earthquake struck Santa Barbara in 1925, severely damaging the downtown area as well as parts of the mission. During reconstruction, the city consciously drew on its Hispanic architectural heritage. Santa Barbara established architectural review mechanisms, and Spanish Colonial Revival became central to the city's rebuilt visual identity.

That changed the way I looked at the city. White walls. Red tile roofs. Arches. Courtyards. Decorative ironwork. What appears to the visitor as a perfectly coherent historical environment is partly genuine inheritance and partly curated continuity. And I do not mean that critically. Quite the opposite. From a producer's point of view, it is fascinating. Santa Barbara did what successful cultural institutions often do: it selected elements of its history and made them part of a consistent contemporary identity. The city does not merely contain history. It performs a version of its history every day.

Before reaching Santa Barbara, however, I made another stop - Solvang. And this was probably one of my favorite parts of the entire trip. I like Europe. So the idea of suddenly finding a Danish town in the middle of California was impossible to resist. And Solvang works immediately. Timbered façades. Windmills. Small shops. Bakeries. Coffee. Ice cream. Flowers. Pedestrian-scale streets.

I tried Danish pastries, had coffee, and walked around without any particular agenda. It felt genuinely cozy. And, surprisingly, it did remind me of Europe. At the same time, my producer's brain kept whispering: This is also a set. And historically, both impressions are correct.

Solvang was founded in 1911 by Danish immigrants, who purchased nearly 9,000 acres in the Santa Ynez Valley to establish a Danish-American colony. The name itself roughly means “sunny field.”

But the visual “Danish village” identity familiar to tourists developed later. The city's own planning history notes that early Solvang was culturally Danish without necessarily looking like a Danish tourist village; medieval-inspired Danish architecture became increasingly visible from the late 1920s and 1930s onward, and national publicity after World War II helped transform the town into the destination visitors recognize today.

That makes Solvang much more interesting than either of the simple explanations: “It is authentic Denmark.” or “It is fake.” It is neither. It is a real immigrant community that gradually learned to stage its heritage visually. And it stages it very well.

We often use the word authentic as though it has a simple opposite: real/fake. But places like Solvang make that distinction difficult. The Danish history is real. The immigrant community was real. The cultural inheritance is real. The pastries are certainly real, and very good. But windmills, façades and carefully maintained visual motifs are also tools of place branding.

Does that make the experience less authentic? I am not sure it does. Theatre has taught me that constructed environments can still produce genuine emotions. You know a stage set is a stage set. That does not prevent you from responding to it. Solvang works similarly. I knew I was in California. Nobody had secretly transported me to Denmark. But for a few hours the town created enough visual, culinary, and spatial cues to produce a little European interruption in a California road trip. And I enjoyed it enormously.

This is what I increasingly like about road trips in California. The transition itself becomes part of the experience. If you fly into one city, stay there and leave, you encounter a destination. When you drive, you encounter changes. Agricultural land. Hills. Mission landscape. A Danish town. Spanish Colonial Revival. Coast. Pacific light. The meaning of the previous place changes slightly when the next one appears. Solvang becomes more curious after La Purísima. Santa Barbara becomes more interesting after Solvang. And then you continue south toward Malibu, and yet another California begins.

Malibu probably offered the funniest contrast of the trip. After all the cultural and architectural density of the missions, Solvang, and Santa Barbara, we finally reached the famous Southern California coast. And… it was a beach. A nice beach. The Pacific. Sand. Palm-tree-and-ocean energy. A little of that Miami-like coastal feeling. But much more ordinary than decades of American television and film had trained me to expect.

No glamorous revelation. No endless parade of celebrities. And, disappointingly, no lifeguards running toward the ocean in slow motion wearing red swimsuits. Reality had failed television. Or perhaps television had simply been doing its job. Because Malibu is an excellent reminder that cultural mythology often edits out the ordinary. The real world contains parking. Wind. People carrying bags. Someone looking for a restroom. Clouds arriving at inconvenient times. Cinema has better control of the production schedule. And I actually liked that.

After spending the trip looking at places that actively preserve or stage their identities, Malibu offered the reverse experience. The mythology was huge. The physical place was pleasantly normal. What surprised me most is that Santa Barbara was the reason for the trip, but Solvang and the missions became its strongest memories. Perhaps that is how good road trips work. The destination gives you a reason to leave. The route gives you the story. And this particular route revealed several different ways California constructs its identity.

At La Purísima, history is reconstructed so that we can physically move through it.

At Old Mission Santa Barbara, history becomes monument, museum, and continuing religious institution.

In Santa Barbara itself, Spanish heritage became the foundation for a consciously designed twentieth-century urban identity.

In Solvang, immigrant heritage becomes place branding and cultural theatre.

And in Malibu, popular culture has constructed a mythology so powerful that an actual beach almost struggles to compete with it.

These are completely different mechanisms. Yet all of them produce the same result: we arrive already carrying an image of the place.

This is my first note from Many Californias. California is often presented internationally through a surprisingly small collection of images. Hollywood. Beaches. San Francisco. Palm trees. National parks. Silicon Valley. But living here and driving through the state has made me increasingly suspicious of the singular word California. There are too many of them.

Spanish California. Mexican California. Indigenous California. Immigrant California. Agricultural California. Hollywood California. Tech California. Desert California. Mountain California. California reconstructed through history. And California invented through movies. Sometimes they exist hundreds of miles apart. Sometimes they exist on the same road. That is the idea behind this new series of field notes: Many Californias.

Not a guide to the state's “best attractions.” Not a ranking. Just an attempt to understand how dramatically the story changes when you take another road. For the first journey, I left Monterey looking for a city I remembered from childhood television. I found a Danish village, three different ways of remembering the mission era, a city that rebuilt itself around a historical aesthetic, and a famous beach that turned out to be reassuringly ordinary.

Maybe that is a good definition of California itself.
Part history. Part memory. Part carefully constructed image. And part surprise when you finally see it for yourself.