Escorted Rail Tours to Big Sur

Beautiful beaches and the San Lucia Mountains

With a name derived from "el sur grande" - meaning "the big south" - the sublime Big Sur coastline runs for 90 untamed miles from just south of Monterey down into San Luis Obispo County. The landscape in this famous region is notoriously wild; the beaches rise dramatically into the San Lucia Mountains, which are some of the tallest coastal mountains in all of North America. As a result, for many years, even in the first few decades of the 20th century, the Big Sur region was as undeveloped and inaccessible as any remote part of the United States. Most of the area's relatively sparse population lived without electricity until connections to the main Californian grid were established.