Half Moon Bay hotels collection

James Johnston, who came west with the Gold Rush, built a New England house on the Higgins Canyon road: a saltbox of white boards, two storeys at the front, one at the back, beneath a long sloping roof. The town was called Spanishtown for as long as Spanish was mostly what was spoken there; it later took the name of its bay, a crescent closed off by Pillar Point. Summer fog drifts over the glasshouses and the fields, then catches in the redwoods of Purisima Creek. In winter, off the point, the swell rears up over a shelf of rock at Mavericks and breaks far from the shore.