Historical Highlights in San Benito County

In 1772, the colonizing Father Juan Crespi named this area’s biggest river after the organizer and codifier of the monastic orders, Saint Benedict. The Spanish called him San Benito. It’s a thinly populated county—62,808 at last count—but more are pouring in, turning this area into a bedroom community for the Santa Clara Valley. In Hollister, the county seat, homes average at $765,000. San Benito County is changing from a place where people ride horses for work to a place for people who can afford horse property.

Despite these changes, pieces of the past remain in this land located East of the Gabilans (the title of Marjorie Pierce’s 1976 nonfiction history of the region). At the San Benito County Historical and Recreational Park, located on Highway 25 in Tres Pinos, visitors will find a collection of historical homes, buildings, vehicles, and farm implements from the county’s early days.

Farther down the highway is Pinnacles National Park, a stretch of lonely vistas, razor sharp rocks, caves, and 30 miles of hiking trails. Peering up in the skies above, one might see the biggest land bird in North America, the critically endangered California condor—the last remnant of Gymnogyps, a genus that cruised the skies during the Pleistocene era. The white patches on their underwings distinguish them from the similar-looking turkey vulture. Their pterodactyl size is another tell—turkey vultures don’t have a nine-foot wingspan.

San Benito County contains an actual ghost town: the since-closed mercury mines at Idria, named after a city in Slovenia. It's now fenced off as a Superfund site. (Read more in this two-part series in Sunset magazine.)

Seekers of figments are further directed to the well-preserved mission of San Juan Bautista, to seek the ghost of Madeleine Elster, played by Kim Novak in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1957). But the tower from which the haunted lady met her doom was a Hollywood matte. Probably a good thing it wasn’t real, given how seismic the area is; San Benito County is sort of the buckle on the earthquake belt. The San Andreas Fault is only a short walk from the old mission … as is the mass grave of some 4,000 natives killed by European poxes and fevers.