Natural Instinct: A Slow Travel Guide to Big Sur, California

Some resorts are all about the food, others impress with their amenities. While Cambria Beach Lodge has everything you’d want in a retro roadside inn, the biggest draw is the location. The former motel turned beach lodge is close to the shores of San Simeon, where hundreds of elephant seals congregate at the Piedras Blancas rookery. The hippy hamlet of Harmony (population 18), with its historic links to California’s creative community, is just a short drive. The kicker: the lodge is directly across from sandy-bottomed Moonstone Beach (popular with long-boarders).

Andrew Molera State Park is not as developed as other US parks, but that’s part of the appeal. It’s known for high ridges, open meadows, rows of sycamore and redwood trees, the Big Sur River, plenty of easy-to-navigate hiking trails – and an incredibly long, mostly sandy beach, offering a crowd-free shoreline to go beachcombing on, or simply enjoy the sound of the waves.

Located offshore from Big Sur and the Central Coast, the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary is the largest of its kind in the United States with 276mi (444km) of shoreline. It’s a protected habitat for 30-plus species of marine mammals and more than 90 species of seabirds, which you can observe on guided kayak tours. This is a slow-paced kayaking outing for nature lovers who want to gently explore a marine habitat, spying bobbing sea otters bathing in the kelp forest, summiting sea lions and passing pods of dolphins.

Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, named after a much-respected 19th-century rancher, contains vast stretches of the Big Sur coastline, 2,950ft (900m) ridges, granite cliffs, an 82ft (25m) waterfall and vast redwoods. One of the biggest draws for birders is the chance to see the California condor, the largest flying bird in North America. The condor can soar as high as 15,000ft (4,600m) and is considered a sacred animal by Native Americans.