Chumash people have lived along this coastline for at least ten thousand years, and the twenty-seven miles of coastline you see are among the most beautiful in California. The Chumash were master maritime people who built plank canoes called tomols from redwood logs and paddled across the Santa Barbara Channel to Catalina and the Channel Islands, trading and fishing across a maritime territory that extended from Malibu to Morro Bay. They built large village settlements along this coast, developed a sophisticated bead currency system, painted elaborate astronomical art on cave walls in the mountains above, and maintained a population of perhaps thirty thousand people before European contact.
The Spanish missions reduced and displaced the Chumash; the population collapsed by ninety percent in the century after contact. The name Malibu comes from the Chumash village of Humaliwo, which means where the surf sounds loudly. The twenty-seven miles of coastline you see stretching in both directions were owned as a private ranch by the Rindge family from 1892 until the 1920s, and the battle to keep a public road off their land produced some of the earliest private property versus public access litigation in California.
The Pacific Coast Highway along this coast was not completed until 1929. Pull over at any beach access point and walk to the water.