California’s New Chumash Marine Sanctuary Protects Key Species

Damp chilly seeped into my bones because the solar disappeared over Estero Bluffs State Park, close to the city of Cayucos, California. I picked my method throughout tide swimming pools, holding an eye fixed out for octopuses hiding between rocks. I used to be on a foraging tour with the group Kelpful, studying to gather and put together seaweed, simply because the Chumash and Salinean Individuals who first inhabited these lands did for hundreds of years.

For the previous decade, a number of Indigenous teams throughout the state have been working to create a protected zone alongside this a part of California’s Central Coast. The concept was first proposed in 2015 by Chief Fred Collins of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council and saved alive by his daughter, Violet Sage Walker—now the council’s chairperson—after he died in 2021. “My father believed we should do higher for Mom Earth, the animals, and one another,” Walker instructed me. “It’s an honor to hold his legacy ahead.”

Final September, the Biden administration designated some 4,500 sq. miles of coastal waters, stretching from San Luis Obispo to the Gaviota Coast of Santa Barbara county, because the nation’s first marine sanctuary that’s comanaged by Indigenous peoples. The Chumash Heritage Nationwide Marine Sanctuary protects seashores and shorelines, and in addition extends 60 miles into the Pacific Ocean, safeguarding quite a lot of flora, like dense kelp forests, and fauna, together with leopard and horn sharks, blue whales, and black abalone. Simply as essential, it acknowledges “tribal burial grounds, ceremonial websites, and spiritually vital locations,” Walker mentioned.

Indigenous-led excursions of the sanctuary are coming quickly. Within the meantime, vacationers can go whale-watching with Finest Day Ever Boat Adventures or lease a kayak, like I did, from Avila Seashore Paddlesports.

To study Chumash life, a very good first cease is the Santa Ynez Chumash Museum & Cultural Middle, which opened final yr. Guests enter by way of a big ‘Ap, a conventional dome-shaped home, which has iron doorways engraved with pictographs and handles produced from clapper sticks (a musical instrument utilized in songs and ceremonies). Guests can even wander by way of a 3.5-acre backyard that has native crops like dogbane and yerba mansa in addition to reveals about Chumash basketry, redwood canoes, and different traditions. 

The museum’s location can also be vital: it faces Level Conception, a rugged headland to the west that the Chumash name Humqaq, the place their ancestors left the bodily world to enter the spirit realm. “For my father, our ancestors, and elders who’ve handed,” Walker mentioned, “they’d be most excited realizing that space can be without end protected.”

A model of this story first appeared within the February 2025 difficulty of Journey + Leisure underneath the headline “Sacred Waters.”