Save Naples
Campaign to Protect the Gaviota Coast
A Once-in-a-Generation Conservation Opportunity
The Gaviota Coast is one of the last largely undeveloped stretches of coastline in Southern California. Naples sits at its western edge, where development pressure meets one of Santa Barbara County’s most intact coastal landscapes.
Naples – Santa Barbara Ranch
Why This Place is Unique
At more than 1,000 acres, the Santa Barbara Ranch (SBR) at Naples property is a landscape of extraordinary scale, beauty, and ecological diversity. Its coastal terraces, rolling hills, oak woodlands, riparian corridors, and sweeping views of the Pacific create one of the most dramatic and intact landscapes in our county.
Its significance extends far beyond its beauty. Naples/SBR is part of the Gaviota Coast — a nearly 50-mile stretch of coastline where protected lands, working landscapes, wildlife habitat, cultural resources, and rural communities come together as one of Southern California’s most important remaining coastal conservation areas.
For decades, the Land Trust has worked to protect and care for places along this coast, including Arroyo Hondo Preserve and the nearby Gaviota Overlook. Together, these places reflect a larger vision for the Gaviota Coast: a connected landscape where habitat, watersheds, working lands, public access, and cultural stewardship can endure.
Naples/SBR represents the next major opportunity in that vision. Its scale and continuity would help strengthen the network of protected and undeveloped lands along the Gaviota Coast while creating an important connection to the Naples State Marine Conservation Area (Naples SMCA). Together, these protections can support wildlife, protect watersheds and habitat, sustain working lands, and preserve the ecological connections between land and sea that allow the Gaviota Coast to remain resilient over time.
But the ranch also holds a special place in the identity of Santa Barbara County. Its undeveloped ridgelines, expansive ocean views, and dramatic meeting of land and sea embody the coast that generations of residents have cherished.
For more than a century, development pressure has threatened to change that landscape. Today, we have a rare opportunity to choose a different future.
Permanent protection of Naples/SBR would ensure that generations to come inherit this remarkable place not as a memory of what once was, but as a living landscape — open, connected, working, wild, and unmistakably Santa Barbara.
History of Planned Development
140 Years of Land Use Conflict
Long before 1887, this coast was home to Chumash villages. Through the Mission and rancho eras Chumash people were displaced from these lands, which then passed through a series of private owners. In 1887, wealthy Ohio couple John and Alice Williams purchased 900 acres of oceanfront land for $50,000, struck by its resemblance to the Bay of Naples. With four Southern Pacific Railroad executives promising a coastal rail line, they platted 400 residential lots, mapped streets, and planned a world-class hotel. The railroad never came. The hotel was never built. The town never materialized. What remained was an 1888 subdivision map—and a real estate gamble that would shape the fate of this coastline for generations.
The map was rediscovered in the 1970s, and in the 1980s a developer used it to propose a gated community of up to 274 homes, prompting significant opposition. The question was no longer whether the map existed, but what to do with a 19th-century subdivision in the middle of one of California’s last wild coastlines.
A 1994 California Supreme Court ruling upheld the landowners’ development rights under the historic township maps, constraining the County’s options. Santa Barbara County faced a difficult choice: deny development and risk a court-ordered project far larger than anything it could negotiate, or approve a scaled-down plan with conservation concessions. After a decade of public hearings attended by hundreds, the County approved 71 mansions in 2008—each up to 10,000 square feet. Not a single public comment from an unaffiliated member of the public supported the project, and the Coastal Commission never approved it.
What followed were decades of renewed development pressure: two Memoranda of Understanding favoring development, multiple applications, a foreclosure, illegal disking of protected habitat, and repeated restoration violations. Santa Barbara County has repeatedly found creative ways to hold the line, including a transfer-of-development-rights policy that remains a model for coastal counties. Yet the threat has continued to reassemble itself in new forms.
A Global Biodiversity Hotspot
Local Conservation, Global Impact
Naples/SBR lies within a globally recognized biodiversity hotspot—one of the places on Earth where exceptional biological diversity, rare species, and threatened habitats converge.
At more than 1,000 acres, Naples/SBR represents an unusually large and intact piece of this globally important landscape. Its coastal terraces, intact California native grasslands, riparian corridors, oak woodlands, and mountain ridgelines create a connected mosaic of habitats that supports biodiversity at a landscape scale.
The ranch provides refuge for white-tailed kites, endangered native pollinators, and other species that depend on increasingly fragmented habitats. Its native grasslands are among California’s most imperiled plant communities. These grasslands and coastal habitats were shaped over millennia by Chumash cultural burning and stewardship. Its position adjacent to Naples SMCA also creates a rare opportunity to protect the connection between terrestrial and marine ecosystems, a connection central to Chumash life on this coast.
Naples/SBR stretches from the coastal terrace inland toward the mountain ridgeline, helping to protect the undeveloped lands and habitat connections that could support wildlife movement between the Gaviota Coast and Los Padres National Forest. Protecting this connectivity is increasingly important as habitat fragmentation and climate change place growing pressure on ecosystems.
The significance of this landscape has been recognized beyond the local level. A leading biodiversity meta-analysis identified the area as a national conservation priority, underscoring the importance of protecting large, connected landscapes like this one (Hamilton et al., 2021. Ecological Applications).
Protecting Naples/SBR would conserve a remarkable piece of a globally significant biodiversity hotspot—and one of the country’s most important remaining opportunities to protect connected coastal habitat.
Cultural Significance
Rich Chumash History
Naples/SBR is part of the Ancestral homelands of the Chumash people, a living cultural landscape shaped by thousands of years of Chumash stewardship. Dos Pueblos Creek takes its name from the two Chumash villages at its mouth Mikiw and Kuyamu, communities that have defined this coastline for centuries. For Chumash people, and the many Chumash communities, bands, and families with ties to this coast, this land remains inseparable from identity, history, and relationship to the sea.
Chumash communities have long understood this land not as something to own, but as something to care for. Cultural burning, seasonal harvesting, and ocean-going trade networks sustained the relationships among coast, islands, valley, and mountain. That stewardship is not only the first chapter of Naples’ story; it is an ongoing one, carried forward by Chumash communities/cultural practitioners whose relationships with this coast endure, and whose leadership can help guide the preserve’s future.
Chumash relationships with this coast are not only history. Today, Chumash communities continue to gather native plants for basketry, food, and medicine; revive language and cultural fire practices; and paddle tomols, traditional plank canoes, across the Santa Barbara Channel to Limuw (Santa Cruz Island). Protecting Naples/SBR keeps this landscape whole for those living relationships, and opens the door for Chumash communities to help guide the preserve’s care for generations to come.
THE VISION
A Preserve Shaped by Care and Collaboration
The Land Trust envisions a preserve that protects the property’s extraordinary ecological and cultural resources while creating meaningful opportunities for people to experience and learn from this special place. This would be a 1,000+ acre nature preserve on the Gaviota Coast—permanently protected, thoughtfully restored, and cared for as a place where nature, culture, and community can thrive for generations to come.
Bringing Naples/SBR from a property long envisioned for development toward permanent protection has required an extraordinary amount of work. Years of due diligence, legal analysis, negotiations, and creative deal design have helped make a different future possible—one centered on conservation rather than large-scale development.
Acquisition is the first step. Establishing a nature preserve on this scale is a long-term undertaking, with important work ahead to plan, steward, and thoughtfully open the land to the community.
Future trails, gathering areas, and other opportunities to experience the preserve will be thoughtfully considered in relation to public safety, sensitive habitats and species, cultural resources, and the unique character of the landscape. As part of this effort, the Land Trust will embark on a two-year planning process to help shape the future of the preserve. We will consult with Chumash Tribal governments and communities, and engage community members, neighbors, conservation partners, scientists, and other stakeholders in a comprehensive planning process.
This process will help guide decisions about how the property can be cared for, experienced, and shared in ways that reap: its ecological and cultural significance.
A PARTNERSHIP TO SAVE NAPLES
The Land Trust for Santa Barbara County
Local Conservation Leadership
For more than 40 years, The Land Trust for Santa Barbara County has been building a legacy of permanent conservation.
Working with landowners, public agencies, conservation organizations, and community partners, we have protected some of Santa Barbara County’s most important landscapes—and built the expertise to care for them for generations to come.
Today, the Land Trust has permanently protected more than 58,650 acres throughout the county. Our growing team brings deep expertise in land conservation, stewardship, community engagement, and complex real estate transactions, giving us the capacity to take on opportunities of increasing scale and significance.
Santa Barbara Ranch represents the next chapter in that legacy. Protecting and stewarding a landscape of this scale will require vision, collaboration, and a long-term commitment to the land. The Land Trust is positioned to bring together the partnerships, resources, and expertise needed to make that vision a reality.
Wild America Fund
Deal Expertise & Capital
Protecting Naples is a once-in-a-generation opportunity—and one that calls for collaboration with partners with deep experience executing complex deals. Wild America Fund brings deal-ready capital, complex deal support, and capacity to close to important landscapes across the US where timely action can help secure their future.
The Gaviota Coast is one of Wild America Fund’s priority landscapes, recognized for its exceptional biodiversity, ecological connectivity, and opportunity for lasting conservation. WAF is partnering with the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County to help make protection of Naples possible and strengthen the network of conserved lands along the coast. Learn more about WAF at wildamericafund.org.
MAKE AN IMPACT FOR NAPLES — AND BEYOND
Your gift helps the Land Trust act when conservation opportunities are within reach.
Today, that opportunity is Naples/SBR. With your support, we can pursue the protection of this extraordinary landscape while continuing the year-round work that makes conservation possible across Santa Barbara County.Every gift helps build the capacity to move quickly, work with willing landowners, secure critical funding, plan for long-term stewardship, and remain ready for the next important place that needs protection.
Make a Lasting Impact
Interested in making a major gift, pledge, stock gift, or other contribution toward the campaign? We would be glad to speak with you about how your support can make a lasting impact.
CONTACT
Vanessa Stowers
Development & Communications Director
[email protected]
$65M Secured as of September 2026.
Portions of funding are directly allocated to stewardship of property. Help us close the gap!
Frequently Asked Questions
Naples is a 1,000+ acre coastal property on the Gaviota Coast, one of the last largely undeveloped stretches of coastline in Southern California. The property is officially known as Santa Barbara Ranch and includes the area locally known as Naples. The landscape includes coastal bluffs, ranchlands, creeks, wildlife habitat, cultural resources, and sweeping views of the Pacific.
Santa Barbara Ranch is the property’s official name, while Naples is the name commonly used to refer to this special coastal area. The Land Trust uses “Naples” throughout this campaign because it is the name familiar to the local community, while Santa Barbara Ranch identifies the property itself.
Naples is part of the Gaviota Coast, one of the last largely undeveloped stretches of coastline in Southern California. The landscape is important for its exceptional biodiversity, agricultural lands, cultural significance, and connection between the mountains and the sea. Protecting Santa Barbara Ranch would permanently conserve the vast majority of the Naples area and represent a major step toward safeguarding this remarkable stretch of coast.
The Land Trust and Wild America Fund are working together to help make the conservation of Santa Barbara Ranch possible. The Land Trust brings local conservation expertise, community relationships, and long-term stewardship experience, while Wild America Fund brings additional resources and experience supporting complex conservation transactions.
Your gift will directly support the Naples project—from acquiring Santa Barbara Ranch to establishing it as a new nature preserve. Support will help make the acquisition possible and provide the resources needed for planning, restoration, public access, and long-term stewardship as we bring this vision to life.
To discuss a major gift, pledge, stock gift, or other contribution, please contact Vanessa Stowers, Development & Communications Director, at [email protected].
Not yet. Santa Barbara Ranch remains privately owned and is currently at risk of development. Conserving the property would permanently protect the vast majority of the Naples area, while some additional privately owned parcels would remain outside the project.
Santa Barbara Ranch is currently at risk of development. Permanent protection would change the future of this remarkable landscape, ensuring the vast majority of the Naples area remains open, connected, working, wild, and unmistakably Santa Barbara for generations to come.
The Land Trust for Santa Barbara County is leading the effort to conserve Santa Barbara Ranch. As a local land trust, we bring decades of experience protecting land in Santa Barbara County, along with local relationships, conservation expertise, and a long-term commitment to stewardship.
Wild America Fund is a national conservation organization that works with land trusts and other conservation partners to help protect important landscapes. For this project, Wild America Fund is providing deal-ready capital, complex deal support, and capacity to close as the Land Trust works toward securing Santa Barbara Ranch.
The goal is to acquire and permanently protect Santa Barbara Ranch and establish it as a new nature preserve. Acquisition is the first step. Additional planning, restoration, public access, and long-term stewardship work will follow to ensure this special place can be cared for and shared for generations to come.
The Land Trust envisions the conserved property as a future nature preserve with meaningful opportunities for people to experience and learn from this special place. After acquisition, a two-year preserve planning process will help determine appropriate public access, education, restoration, and stewardship priorities while protecting sensitive ecological and cultural resources.
News & Resources
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Property Photos by Gavin Palmer at VirTour Media – Courtesy of Coastal Ranch | Kerry Mormann & Associates.
