About halfway through our walking tour of Monterey’s historic downtown, we came to the Cooper-Molera Adobe. It was a hot. dry afternoon, and we were tired. It gave us a perfect reason to hang out in the gardens and soak up some of Monterey’s history.
A site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation
In the photos above, the left shows the entrance to the gardens on the grounds of the Cooper-Molera Adobe. We didn’t realize at the time that these gardens were not part of the original site. The original gardens were actually built inside the adobe walls to protect them from wandering cattle and wild animals. I later learned that the orchard we saw during our visit was added in the 1980s by the California State Parks.
In all, there are now five different gardens at the Cooper Molera Adobe: an orchard, a rose garden, an herb garden, a scented geranium garden, and an adobe wall garden. The flowers pictured here are just one small part of the entire picture.
The streets of Monterey—a chaotic history
The Cooper Molera Adobe was built on what is now the intersection of three busy streets: Munras, Polk, and Alvarado. Prior to 1820, Monterey had no street plan. The National Park Service describes it as “a tangle of irregularly laid streets lined with pristine, whitewashed adobe buildings.” As we walked the streets on our tour, we got a feel for just how chaotic it might have been to navigate those early Monterey roads. Especially during the beginning of our tour, nothing seemed to make sense. But I suppose that’s part of the charm of old Monterey and its history.
If you’d like to check out the previous parts of our walking tour, you can find them at Visiting Old Monterey — the walking tour and The Stevenson House in Old Monterey. Click here to view more Friday Morning Post entries, or you can follow me on Twitter.
