Mendocino sits on a dramatic headland where the coastal bluffs drop straight into the Pacific, and the town looks like it was airlifted from Cape Cod and set down on the California coast — which is essentially what happened. New England whalers settled here in the 1850s and built the saltbox houses, white-steepled church, and water towers that still define the skyline. The entire village is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Artists discovered Mendocino in the 1950s and the town has been an arts colony ever since. Galleries and studios fill the historic buildings alongside good restaurants and small inns. The pace is slow, the scale intimate — the town covers barely four blocks in any direction.
Television viewers may recognise the village as "Cabot Cove, Maine," the fictional setting of Murder, She Wrote, which filmed here for years. The dramatic headlands jutting into the ocean, the weathered Victorian architecture, and the ever-present sea fog all lend themselves to the show's moody atmosphere.
The headland itself is now Mendocino Headlands State Park — free to walk, with trails along the bluffs offering views of sea arches, surge channels, and, in winter and spring, migrating gray whales. Big River Beach sits just south of town, where the Big River empties into the ocean and the estuary can be paddled by kayak or canoe.