Carmel-by-the-Sea

Carmel Beach is the town's front lawn. It is a long curve of fine white sand at the bottom of Ocean Avenue, backed by cypress trees and dunes. Locals walk their dogs here at sunrise, people come down with blankets at sunset, and on a clear day the view runs across the bay to the golf links of Pebble Beach. Swimming is another matter. Even in late summer the water stays around 12-14°C, the surf is strong, and morning fog often sits on the shore until midday.

South of town, Carmel River State Beach and Monastery Beach are even more beautiful, but the drop-offs are steep and the shore break is dangerous, so they are for looking at, not swimming. Wetsuit surfers and paddlers use the water. Most visitors take a walk on the sand and swim in a hotel pool.

For a village of a few thousand people, Carmel eats remarkably well. The square-mile grid holds intimate French and Italian dining rooms, candlelit bistros in cottages, and a long list of tasting rooms pouring Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from the Santa Lucia Highlands and Carmel Valley. Monterey Bay supplies the local cooking: Dungeness crab, sand dabs, calamari and the artichokes grown inland around Castroville. Breakfast is a small ritual of bakeries and courtyard cafés.

The weakness is range. There is little street food, little that is cheap or casual, and almost no cooking from beyond Europe and California. Dinner tends to be a refined, expensive and fairly early affair. For a market, ethnic eateries or a meal after a long day, you drive into Monterey or Seaside.

The main sight is the Carmel Mission, Mission San Carlos Borromeo. Founded in 1771, it is where Junípero Serra is buried, and its stone basilica, gardens and museum rooms are among the finest in California's mission chain. In the village itself, the character is in the buildings. There are the storybook cottages of the 1920s, with curved rooflines and crooked chimneys, the bohemian timber houses of the early artists' colony, and Tor House, the granite house and tower the poet Robinson Jeffers built by hand above the sea.

Add the many art galleries and a walk through the streets, which have no house numbers, and you have most of it. There is no major museum, and the cultural sights fill a morning or two rather than a stay.

Carmel goes to bed early. An evening out means a glass of wine in a tasting room or a wine bar before it closes, a long dinner, and perhaps a nightcap in a hotel lounge. There are no clubs, and the streets are quiet by ten. Anyone wanting more than that drives to the bars of Monterey's Alvarado Street, which are themselves modest.

This is the real reason to base yourself in Carmel. Five minutes south, Point Lobos State Natural Reserve has some of the most beautiful short coastal walks in North America: granite headlands, wind-shaped Monterey cypress, coves full of harbour seals and sea otters, and grey whales passing offshore in winter and spring. Past it the Big Sur coast begins, with Garrapata's bluff trails and Bixby Bridge about half an hour away and the redwood canyons of Pfeiffer Big Sur within an hour or so.

Inland, Carmel Valley turns sunny and dry, with oak-covered hiking in Garland Ranch Regional Park. To the north, the 17-Mile Drive runs past the famous golf links and cypress points of Pebble Beach. Monterey Bay is known for kayaking among otters, kelp-forest diving and whale-watching boats. Summer mornings are often foggy and the light is best in autumn.

The nearest outing is barely a trip at all. Monterey is a short drive away, with Cannery Row, Fisherman's Wharf and the adobe buildings of its old Spanish and Mexican capital. Next to it, Pacific Grove has Victorian houses and a lighthouse. Carmel Valley Village, half an hour inland, is a sunny lane of wine-tasting rooms, and the vineyards of the Santa Lucia Highlands lie beyond it.

Further afield, Salinas has the National Steinbeck Center in the farm country of his novels, and San Juan Bautista keeps a mission and a small historic plaza. Santa Cruz, about an hour north, adds a seaside boardwalk and a surf town atmosphere. San Francisco is closer to two and a half hours, which makes it a long day rather than an easy one.

Carmel itself is a grown-up place of galleries, wine and quiet inns, but it is safe and gentle, and it sits next to one of the great family attractions on the coast. The Monterey Bay Aquarium, fifteen minutes away on Cannery Row, has sea otters, a kelp forest tank and a vast open-ocean gallery, and it can fill a whole day. Children also like the tide pools at Point Lobos and Pacific Grove, digging on Carmel Beach, and Dennis the Menace Playground in Monterey.

The drawbacks are cold, rough water that rules out paddling for small children, restaurants that suit quiet adults, and the need to drive almost everywhere. It suits families with school-age children who enjoy wildlife more than rides.

The village is a small grid of about a square mile, easily walked from the shops of Ocean Avenue down to the beach, although the hill is steep. There are no house numbers, no street lights in the residential lanes and few pavements outside the centre, so evening walks are dark and gently rural. Local buses connect to Monterey and Carmel Valley, but services are thin.

Almost everything worth doing beyond the village needs a car: Point Lobos, the Big Sur coast, the wineries and the aquarium. Parking in the centre is tight in summer and at weekends. Most visitors arrive by road, and the nearest airport is Monterey's small regional one.

Shopping in Carmel means browsing more than buying in earnest. The few blocks around Ocean Avenue and Dolores Street hold an unusual number of art galleries for a town this size, mostly coastal landscapes, plein-air painting, photography and sculpture. Between them, small courtyards and passageways hide boutiques selling cashmere, jewellery, homeware and wine. Two small open-air shopping centres at either end of the village add some upmarket chain fashion.

It is polished, expensive and small. There is no department store, no market worth the name and no local craft tradition beyond the painting, so a keen shopper covers it in an afternoon. Most visitors browse between meals and walks on the coast, and anyone wanting more drives up to the outlets and malls around Monterey.

Carmel is one of the most expensive small towns in California. Rooms in the village are mostly boutique inns and cottages, and they are priced as a luxury destination even outside summer. The resort lodges of Pebble Beach and Carmel Valley are higher still. Dinner, wine tasting and spa time all cost a lot, and there is little cheap food to balance them.

The best things are free: the beach, the village streets and most coastal walks. Staying in Monterey or Seaside and driving in is the usual way to make a visit cheaper.

For its size, Carmel takes the arts seriously, mostly in season. The Carmel Bach Festival has filled the summer with Baroque concerts since 1935. Many of them are held at the Sunset Center, a former school turned performing arts hall, which also hosts touring musicians and speakers through the year. The Forest Theater, an outdoor stage among the pines that dates from the early artists' colony, puts on summer plays and musicals under the stars.

Nearby, the Monterey Jazz Festival is one of the longest-running in the world and brings the jazz crowd each September. Outside those seasons, live performance comes down to occasional concerts, small community theatre and a guitarist in a wine bar.

Carmel's restorative quality comes from its pace rather than from any bathing tradition. Mornings are misty and quiet, and the evenings are dark and still. The luxury lodges of Pebble Beach and the sunny resorts of Carmel Valley have well-regarded spas with massages, treatments and pools, and several village inns offer in-room treatments.

There are no thermal springs, public baths or hammams to visit, so wellness here means a good spa day, a fireside room and long walks rather than a culture of bathing. It suits couples looking for a slow, comfortable weekend more than anyone seeking a dedicated retreat.