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- Whale-Watching
- San Juan Batista
- Fine Dining
About as close to early-19th-century California as you can get, San Juan Bautista (15 mi east of Watsonville on Hwy. 156) has been protected from development since 1933, when much of it became a state park. Small antiques shops and restaurants occupy the Old West and art-deco buildings that line 3rd Street.
The wide green plaza of San Juan Bautista State Historic Park is ringed by 18th- and 19th-century buildings, many of them open to the public. The cemetery of the long, low, colonnaded mission church contains the unmarked graves of more than 4,300 Native American converts. Nearby is an adobe home furnished with Spanish-colonial antiques, a hotel frozen in the 1860s, a blacksmith shop, a stable, a pioneer cabin, and a jailhouse. The first Saturday of each month, costumed volunteers engage in quilting bees, tortilla making, and other frontier activities.
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