An legendary Hacienda tucked into the lush Santa Barbara foothills re-stakes its claim as a sunny haunt for Hollywood stars, political leaders and savvy traveler.
By Michael M. Clements
Originally part of land titled in 1769 by the Kind of Spain, San Ysidro Ranch served as a way station for Franciscan monks in the late 1700s and a working citrus ranch in the 1800s; in the 1930s Hollywood actor and former California Senator Ronald Colman transformed it into a secluded resort for world leaders and Hollywood’s A-list. John and Jackie Kennedy choose it for their honeymoon in 1953.
“It’s difficult for one used to our Eastern winter climate to imagine a more delightful situation.” – Winston Churchill
For three months during the winter of 1912-13, Winston Churchill, then 38 and having recently been named First Lord of the Admiralty, found himself – surprisingly – not involved greatly in affairs of State. Instead, the iconic British leader sank head first into the California lifestyle. Still forty years removed from his 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature, he waxed poetic about his stay at San Ysidro Ranch: “The mountains, scored by deep canyons,” he wrote, “rise up behind, for all the world like grand-opera scenery idealized, and far below, across the green plains of Montecito, one sees the white line of the beach and the Pacific stretching westward to blue islands shimmering in the haze.” He would return sixteen years later in the fall of 1929 after a visiting with publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst in San Francisco to engage, almost Hemingway-esque, in bill fishing off the coast of nearby Catalina Island.
