Big Sur place names · stop 1 of 43, going north

Sebastian's General Store

Sebastian's General Store
Wikimedia Commons
Highway 1 was open along this coast when it was last checked. Caltrans' own Lane Closure System, as verified 2026-10-06. Today’s road status.

Sebastian's store has been standing since the eighteen-fifties, and it was moved to this spot in 1878. It fed the whalers, then the ranch hands, then the men who built the castle on the hill. When I first came down this coast it was already an institution.

Today the old store is the tasting room of the Hearst Ranch Winery, and the tables under the eucalyptus look across the road to the pier and the beach. You can taste the wines from the ranch's own vineyard at Paso Robles, and the café will feed you lunch, with beef from the cattle you will see grazing on the hills all the way up this coast. It is a fine place for a picnic.

Walk out on the pier afterward, or put your feet in the water at Hearst Memorial Beach, which was the family's beach and is everyone's now. After a hundred and seventy years the store still sells a sandwich, which is a fair record.

Told by Mabel Plaskett, whose column Coast Trails ran in the King City Rustler’s monthly supplement from 1959 to 1964, and who was in print as early as 1941 under the pen name Belinda Brown. Her family has been on this coast since 1869. Her writing.

Sebastian's General Store
Hearst Ranch Winery, from its website — the vineyard under the fog
Sebastian's General Store
JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 — Sebastian's store

Where it is

35.6436, -121.1917 — Highway 1, Big Sur coast, California.

The whole drive, spoken as you go.
Forty-three places between Carmel and San Simeon, free, and it works with no signal once it is loaded — which most of this coast has none of. Open the Big Sur guide.
North: San Simeon →

All forty-three places →