Carmel Highlands Market Report

CARMEL HIGHLANDS HISTORY

The Carmel Highlands is endowed with one of the most beautiful locations on earth, at the juncture of its granite cliffs, the blue sea and sweeping ranges of the Santa Lucia Mountains. It is not surprising that over seventy years ago this community began as an artists’ colony, and has attracted lovers of natural beauty ever since.

Frank Devendorf developed the Highlands as a residential community with a keen appreciation of its unique setting, after founding Carmel-By-The-Sea a few years earlier as a community of creative workers dedicated to the arts. Devendorf and his longtime foreman, Frank DeAmaral, planted pine trees and laid out the roads and building sites to be in harmony with the natural surroundings.

For its first decade, the Carmel Highlands stood on the edges of the wilderness. Access to the outside world was by means of the old county road which connected the Highlands with Carmel, Monterey, and other communities to the north. Southward, the road narrowed to a single lane as it wound up and down canyons and mountain ridges for thirty miles where it stopped in Big Sur. It mainly served local ranchers and farmers who used it to drive their range cattle, crops and timber to market. The building of Highway One in the 1930’s finally opened up the Central Coast to through traffic from Southern California, and tourists soon discovered the area. Point Lobos, which borders the Highlands on the north, became a State Park in the mid-1930’s, and it became a mecca for nature lovers throughout the world. The frontier days of the Carmel Highlands were over…