Mendocino

Mendocino County is the place to find the very best that California has to offer.  The Mendocino lifestyle combines a love and enjoyment of the outdoors, including tons of hiking, kayaking, cycling and camping, with an appreciation of the upscale satisfactions of living well, including wonderful dining, outstanding wines, craft-brewed beers, a huge range of accommodations from comfortable to luxurious, spas, great art and much, much more.

Unlike much of California, Mendocino County is also a place where you can still find serenity and solitude in exhilarating abundance.  For the visitor, the county is still largely undiscovered country, a magnificent taste of California's wilderness interspersed with towns and villages filled with the appeals and attractions of much larger cities.

Spectacular Natural Environment
This is a former timber empire, stretching from mountain lumber towns to seacoast villages and oceanfront farms and ranches raising sheep, cattle, horses, even llamas.  It is a territory of small towns, widely scattered through a landscape that varies from spectacularly dramatic to bucolic. 

Here, the highways and the country roads wind through deep canyons and forests of soaring redwoods; past vineyards, wineries, farms and orchards carpeting low rolling hills; and along mountain ledges or above boulder-strewn beaches and the booming waves of the ocean.

Many visitors think of this as a place to relax and unwind, a place to come and do nothing.  It is that, of course, but it is also a place where you can come and do just about anything.  Aside from its vineyards, farms, ranches and small towns, a great majority of this enormous county is still undeveloped and largely untamed.  So the options and opportunities for outdoor recreation here are literally countless.

An area this vast and varied pays greater rewards the longer you stay.  One day will not be enough, three will give you a taste, five will show you enough to fill your next five-day visit with new and different stops and attractions.

The county is also a national leader in sustainability.  In 2004, Mendocino became the first county in the United States to ban genetically modified organisms (GMOs.)  That means that nothing produced in the county – wine, fruit, vegetables, livestock – contains or uses any genetically modified organisms or material.  That progressive attitude extends to the service the county offers its visitors, as well, with a heavy emphasis on local foods, sustainability and a pervasive respect for the environment.

Colony for Artists
Mendocino has been known as a colony for artists for more than half a century.  Having risen and fallen as a timber town and a lumber port, the city enjoyed a rebirth in the 1950s, as artists of every conceivable stripe, working in every conceivable medium, were drawn by the natural beauty, the coastal landscape and the remote, bohemian lifestyle that was developing up and down the coast of central and northern California.

And while the village’s success has given rise to a wider respect for the art produced in the cities and towns throughout the county, many of those communities have been hotbeds of artistic creation for much longer.  Probably the county’s most famous artist is native daughter Grace Hudson, who was very successful and nationally renowned in her lifetime for her paintings of Native American children.

Today, our artistic and cultural attractions are as much a part of the landscape as the trees and the ocean. There are dozens of galleries and museums, performing groups, bands and musicians.  Don’t be surprised to find, in even our smallest town, an art gallery, many businesses with the work of local artists hanging on their walls, a small museum, an acting company, a community art center, a refurbished historic theater, an art fair, a music or film festival or a writer’s conference.

A deeply artistic sensibility imbues every aspect of existence out here, from tours of studios to the signs on the storefronts.  For the most complete and up-to-date information on the arts throughout the county, visit the website of the Arts Council of Mendocino County, www.artsmendocino.org.