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JOURNAL
LOCAL INTELLIGENCE
Santa Barbara does not look like this by accident. The 1925 earthquake took down a great deal of downtown, and the rebuild was done to a deliberate standard: white stucco, red tile, low rooflines, arcades over the sidewalk. A century later that standard is still enforced, which is why a bank, a bookstore and a burrito counter downtown all wear roughly the same clothes.
The Old Mission sits on the hill above town, set back from the water, and it predates all of it. It is still an active church, so parts of the site work around services and visiting hours shift by season. Check before you drive up. The front steps and the lawn are the photograph everyone takes, but the better half is behind the facade: the courtyard, the old cemetery under the fig and pepper trees, and the view back down over the rooftops toward the channel.
Give it an hour, not a morning. The Mission rewards a slow walk through two or three rooms more than it rewards trying to read every panel.
The County Courthouse is a working government building and also the best free thing to do downtown. Walk in off the street, look up at the painted ceiling in the mural room, then take the clock tower to the top. The view from up there is the one that explains the town: red roofs running down toward the water on one side, the Santa Ynez range standing up hard behind you on the other, and the islands out on the horizon when the air is clear.
Because it is a courthouse, it keeps courthouse hours. Weekdays are the reliable window and public holidays will catch you out. Go in the morning if you can, but not too early in late spring and summer, when the marine layer often sits on the town until midday. A grey lid over the roofline takes most of the point out of the climb.
The walk between the two is downhill and easy, along residential streets rather than shops, and it drops you a few blocks from the top of State Street. Doing it in that order, Mission first and Courthouse second, means you finish where lunch is instead of hiking back up to the car. If you would rather drive it, ask your local manager where to leave the car downtown. The public structures off State are the answer more often than the street is.