Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta

Forty-five minutes south of Sacramento, the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers meet in a maze of channels, artificial islands, and drawbridge towns that constitutes the most unusual landscape in California. The Delta was created by 19th-century Chinese labourers who drained a vast tule marsh to create farmland, and it still has a distinctly pre-industrial quality — houseboat communities, asparagus farms, and levee roads that dead-end unexpectedly in the middle of channels.

The town of Locke, accessible from Highway 160, is the most intact surviving Chinatown built by and for Chinese-American farm workers, dating from 1915. Isleton, nearby, has a short main street of early-20th-century buildings and a good waterfront restaurant scene. Houseboat rentals are available from several marinas for overnight stays on the water.

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A story
The Delta was originally tule marsh — a vast, shallow inland sea of bulrushes that stretched for hundreds of square miles. Chinese workers drained it in the 1870s and 1880s using hand-dug levees, creating the artificial peat islands that now produce potatoes, wine grapes, and asparagus below sea level. The levees have been subsiding ever since; most of the Delta islands are now five to eight feet below the water in the surrounding channels, a slow-motion environmental crisis.

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