The hook
A colony of forty-six hand-built 1930s beach cottages survives on an Orange County cove, a rustic slice of old California beach life that the coast paved over everywhere else.
01Why it's worth it
Crystal Cove started in the 1920s as a seaside tent camp and grew into a bohemian cottage colony, forty-six little cabins that artists and surfers and film crews put up by hand from salvaged wood and catalog kits, clustered around the mouth of a creek on a cove so photogenic that Hollywood used it as a South Seas movie set. Nearly every stretch of the Southern California coast that once looked like this got bulldozed for development. This one didn't. It's a state park now, and the cottages have been restored, so you can walk the historic district, eat at the Beachcomber in a 1930s cabin sitting right over the sand, work the tide pools, and, if you win the reservation lottery months ahead, actually spend a night in one. It's the rare piece of the old California beach that's still standing, still on the sand, and still in use.
02How to experience it
It's on the Newport Coast between Newport Beach and Laguna, about six and a half hours from the Bay and a half-hour south of LA. Day-use parking fills on weekends, but the historic district and the tide pools are free to walk. The Beachcomber takes reservations; the overnight cottages book out by lottery months in advance. Come at low tide for the pools.