SS Palo Alto is a shipwreck now serving as an artificial reef located at Seacliff State Beach on the northern coast of Monterey Bay, approximately 6.4 miles (10.3 km) east of Santa Cruz and 0.9 miles (1.5 km) southwest of Aptos, California. In the mid-1920s, landowners built summer homes on the bluffs above the beach and named the area Seacliff, Rio del Mar. Seacliff became one of California’s first state beaches in 1931. It once featured a famous fishing pier extending to the unique concrete tanker, SS Palo Alto. Today, beachfront camping at Seacliff is reserved for recreational vehicles only, while picnicking, fishing, and docent-led walks are popular activities. California State Parks is conducting a Seacliff Resilience project to understand the impacts of predicted sea level rise, develop adaptation strategies, and recommend actions to enhance resilience.

In 1542 Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed into Monterey Bay while exploring the coast on a Spanish naval expedition. He named the bay Bahía de Los Pinos, probably for the forest of pine trees first encountered while rounding the peninsula at the southern end of the bay. In 1791, Franciscan missionaries established the Mission Santa Cruz. As with the other California missions, Mission Santa Cruz served as a site for the religious conversion of natives, first, the Amah Mutsun people, the original inhabitants of the region renamed the ‘Ohlone‘ by the Spaniards, and later the Yokuts from the east. In 1821, when Mexico gained independence from Spain the area was divided up into land grants. The area of Seacliff Beach was a part of the Rancho Aptos land grant with 6,686 acres (2,706 ha) given to Rafael Castro in 1833. Castro worked with Claus Spreckels to establish the Castro-Spreckels wharf at Seacliff Beach and it became a successful shipping port. In 1838, King Kamehameha III of Hawai’i requested that Mexican vaqueros from California teach Hawaiians how to manage herds of wild cattle. Seacliff became a popular place to recruit vaqueros, who were known as paniolos by the Hawaiians. During the mid-1920s, landowners built summer homes on the bluffs above Seacliff.

Palo Alto was a tanker built from concrete when steel was in short supply during the first world war by the San Francisco Shipbuilding Company at the US Naval Shipyard in Oakland, California, and launched on May 29th 1919. It was completed after the war ended and was moored in San Francisco Bay for a decade. In 1929 Palo Alto was bought by the Seacliff Amusement Corporation and sunk so that the keel rested on the beach near Aptos, California. In 1930 a pier was built connecting the ship to the beach, and a dance floor was constructed on the main deck, a café in the superstructure, a heated swimming pool and a series of carnival-type concessions on the aft deck. In 1932 during the Great Depression, a series of storms cracked the hull, and the investors, hoping to cut their losses, sold their beachfront property and Palo Alto to the state of California in February 1936 for $1. Seacliff Beach was designated as one of the first state beaches, and the pier became a popular recreational site for fishing until the hull deteriorated to an unsafe condition. In 1950 the pier was permanently closed to the public. Following a series of severe storms, the ship deteriorated further and the pier was deemed to be beyond repair and removed in April, 2023. Read more here and here. Explore more of Seacliff State Beach here: