Historic Walking Tour of Santa Barbara Cemetery

The Santa Barbara Cemetery is a gem among cemeteries.

Overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the cemetery is home to actors, industrialists, authors, musicians, sports stars, and many of the town’s founders and leaders.

Tours are 3 hours. $25/person.

Come see Santa Barbara Cemetery.

Tours start in the world-famous chapel designed and built by George Washington Smith and Lutah Maria Riggs in 1924-1925.

The murals in the chapel are also World-renowned: painted by Alfredo Ramos Martinez in 1935, these are unique to Martinez, and to the world of cemeteries.

The Santa Barbara Cemetery is a gem among cemeteries.

Overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the cemetery is home to actors, industrialists, authors, musicians, sports stars, and many of the town’s founders and leaders.

The cemetery has also transcended through five incarnations: as a dusty, geometric town cemetery, as a rudely conceived rural cemetery, as a fitful lawn park cemetery, as an overachieving memorial park, and as a local columbarium.

The Santa Barbara Cemetery has embraced each of these phases and has built upon them, becoming in the end, a modern cemetery that is better than any of the models it followed.

The tour provides a history of the cemetery and a 1-mile walking tour to the most interesting gravesites and sections of the cemetery.

See the burial sites of town leaders Charles Fernald and Thomas More Storke, actors Fess Parker, Ronald Colman, Laurence Harvey, and his daughter Domino; accused murderer Cyrus Barnard, gold magnate Augustus Sahlberg, business founders Jheri Redding, Sam Battistone, Leon Phillips (Puritan Ice), and George Oscar Mayer. Among many others.