For traveling history buffs and culturally-inclined vacationers, San Luis Obispo is a gold mine of historical sites and cultural travel attractions like missions, museums, and national monuments.

Watch the video to see SLO’s charming downtown area, where visitors can choose from a variety of restaurant and shopping establishments.

From the downtown Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, to the renovated historic architecture in and around downtown, to Hearst Castle, planning a historical travel vacation in San Luis Obispo, CA is as easy as grabbing your iPod.

Enhanced with then-and-now photos, San Luis Obispo recently launched the first of several 90-minute multimedia walking tour podcasts of historic downtown San Luis Obispo as the perfect way to kick off a historical travel itinerary.

Historical Travel Ideas

• Download the free historical walking tour podcast from the History Center website (iPods are also available for rental from the History Center of San Luis Obispo).
• Visit the History Center of San Luis Obispo, held in the historic Carnegie Library to see photos and exhibits before beginning your tour.
• Take the podcast-led tour of downtown San Luis Obispo, enjoying a richly detailed and multi-layered look at the city’s history, yesterday and today.
• Stop by the building on the corner of Santa Rosa and Pacific streets, location of one of very few commercial buildings designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
• Visit San Luis Obispo hotels with history, including the first-ever “motel” (not open for business), the Sanitarium (once a Victorian health spa), and the Madonna Inn (a world-famous chateau built in the fifties).
• Stop by California Polytechnic University (Cal Poly) where such icons as Weird Al once studied.
• Take a day-trip to Hearst Castle in San Simeon to see the mansion of William Randolph Hearst.
• Stop off in Cambria on the way back to see the unthinkable Nitt Witt Ridge, handmade of reclaimed materials and a monument of art and architecture in its own right.
• Take a day trip to the Oceano Dunes to see the site of the filming of the Ten Commandments and of the real-life utopian society, the Dunites.
• Visit the hot spring tubs at Sycamore Resort where vacationers used to travel by train from Los Angeles for the curing baths.
• See the monument-in-the-making at Bubblegum Alley in San Luis Obispo.