Santa Barbara County Courthouse

The Santa Barbara County Courthouse is the city's best free attraction and quite possibly the most beautiful public building in America that still hears traffic cases. After the 1925 earthquake flattened much of downtown, the county commissioned architect William Mooser III to build a new courthouse in the Spanish-Moorish style, and the result, completed in 1929, fills an entire city block with arches, wrought iron, carved doors, and tile work in every room it can reach. The interior is the surprise: corridors with stenciled and hand-painted ceilings, staircases lined with patterned tile, and the second-floor Mural Room — the old board of supervisors chamber — wrapped floor to ceiling in murals telling California's history from the Chumash to the Spanish and Mexican eras and statehood. Then there is El Mirador, the 85-foot clock tower: an elevator and a few stairs put you on an open deck with the whole of Santa Barbara laid out — red-tile roofs running down to the harbor, the mission against the mountains, the Channel Islands on the horizon — and it costs nothing. Free docent tours start in the Mural Room on weekday mornings and every afternoon (no reservation needed), the Sunken Gardens on the courthouse lawn host weddings and summer concerts, and the whole thing sits a block off the car-free State Street promenade. Allow an hour; take the tour; go up the tower last.

The building's story is also the city's. Santa Barbara had flirted with Spanish Revival before 1925, but the earthquake gave civic leaders a blank slate and a deliberate idea: rebuild everything in a unified Spanish Colonial Revival style and turn a sleepy Victorian town into a Mediterranean one. The courthouse was the flagship. Mooser's design treats a functioning government building as a small Andalusian city — a great arch framing the mountain view, interior courtyards, a wandering plan that makes each department its own room — and the craftsmen who finished it imported and imitated tile patterns from Spain and North Africa. It remains a working courthouse, so security screening and courtroom etiquette apply, but the public spaces are open to visitors and the county is proud to show them off.

How to visit: enter on Anacapa Street, stop at the information booth near the main archway, and head to the Mural Room on the second floor — free docent tours start there on weekday mornings and daily in the afternoons, except court holidays (confirm the current times before you go). The tour adds the stories you would otherwise walk past: the meaning of the murals, the building's earthquake engineering, the tile and ironwork details. Then ride up El Mirador. The clock tower's deck has a 360-degree view and interpretive panels naming what you see; late afternoon gives the warmest light on the roofs, and on clear days the islands line up across the channel.

Around it: the Sunken Gardens — the lawn sits on the site of the 1872 courthouse — make the best picnic spot downtown and host weddings most weekends (the county is a popular place to marry, for obvious reasons). The State Street promenade, closed to regular traffic and lined with outdoor dining, is a block west; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art is two blocks along; and El Presidio, the 1782 Spanish fort the city grew from, is a short walk east. Do the courthouse on day one: it orients you better than any map, and it is the reason the rest of downtown looks the way it does.