Masthead

Presidio Post is an independent magazine about Santa Barbara, California, and the coast, mountains and valleys within a day's drive of it. It runs long reads on the old adobe quarter and the red-tile downtown, the beaches and the harbor, the neighborhoods, where to sleep, the wine and the taco stands, the towns over the pass and the turn of the seasons.

Why it is called the Post

Santa Barbara began as a military post. Spanish soldiers laid out El Presidio de Santa Bárbara in 1782, and the blocks around its adobe walls grew into the old quarter of the city. The magazine borrows its name from that first post. It is not a hotel or a motel, has no rooms to book, and has nothing to do with any business that has traded under a similar name, or with any tour operator or public agency that turns up in its pages.

The desk

Every story is written and edited by the Presidio Post desk, without bylines. Places are described as they are, and nobody pays to be covered, ranked or left out; the magazine sells no bookings and carries no advertising. Pictures are credited under each image and listed in full on the photo credits page.

Before you set out

Santa Barbara changes with the season and the swell. Opening hours, parking fees, trail closures, beach access and the tide table can all differ from what a story describes, so check with the place itself on the day, and do what the posted signs and the lifeguards tell you, whatever the magazine says.

A word on your visit here

The magazine is a set of static pages with no accounts, comments, sign-up forms, cookies or advertising trackers. Its web server keeps an ordinary access log of each request, meaning the device address, the page, the time and the browser, only to keep the pages up and secure, and that log is cleared on a rolling basis.