Monthly Tours Starting at the Santa Barbara Cemetery

With Historian, David Petry, Author of The Best Last Place: a History of the Santa Barbara Cemetery.

Next Tour Date: Sunday, November 9, 2025 from 10 AM to 1 PM

https://www.sbcemtours.com   Tours at the world-famous Santa Barbara Cemetery are now being offered monthly.  The Santa Barbara Cemetery is unique among cemeteries. Perched on cliffs above the Pacific, it splits its views between the beautiful Santa Ynez mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

It is rare for a burial ground to overlook the sea. It is the site of the Cemetery Chapel, the only sacred architecture completed by George Washington Smith.

Inside the chapel are the only completed murals by Mexican artist, Alfredo Ramos Martinez. Opened in 1868, the cemetery was the alternate to Catholic burial in Santa Barbara.

The handful of Protestants in town began to buy family plots there – for example, wharf-owner/mayor John Peck Stearns, newspaper editor George Tebbets, and architect/mayor Peter J. Barber.

The cemetery is home to actors, industrialists, authors, musicians, sports stars, and many of the town’s founders and leaders.  The cemetery has also transcended through five separate incarnations: as a dusty, geometric town cemetery, as a rudely conceived rural cemetery, as a fitful lawn park cemetery, as an over-achieving memorial park, and as a local columbarium.

The Santa Barbara Cemetery has embraced each of these phases and has built upon them, becoming in the end, a modern cemetery that is better than any of the models it followed.

The tour provides a history of the cemetery and a 1-mile walking tour to the most interesting gravesites and sections of the cemetery.

See the burial sites of town leaders Charles Fernald and Thomas More Storke, actors Ronald Colman, Laurence Harvey, and his daughter Domino, murderer (?) Cyrus Barnard, gold magnate Augustus Sahlberg, business founders Jheri Redding, Sam Battistone, David Nancarrow, and George Oscar Mayer. Among many others.

Logistics

The tour takes 2 ½ to 3 hours.

Wear comfortable walking shoes.

Bring sunglasses, hats, sunscreen, and water.

Bathrooms at the Chapel (start & end of tour).

Photography is permitted.