Unusual museums in Monterey
Looking for unusual museums & collections in Monterey? These 6 are the genuinely strange ones — Tor House & Hawk Tower, Henry Miller Memorial Library, Santa Cruz Surfing Museum and more — each hand-vetted and sourced, not pulled from a top-ten list. Great for an unusual date, a weird afternoon, or showing a visitor the side of Monterey they'd never find on their own.
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Tor House & Hawk Tower
Poet Robinson Jeffers spent four years (1920–1924) single-handedly hauling granite boulders up from the beach…
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Henry Miller Memorial Library
Built by Emil White as his own home in the 1960s and turned into an ungovernable hybrid space after Henry Mil…
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Santa Cruz Surfing Museum
The world's first surfing museum, opened in 1986 inside the Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse — built to honor…
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Shakespeare Society of America (New Shakespeare Sanctuary)
An easy-to-miss building right off Highway 1 holds 10,000+ theater artifacts, 1,000+ costumes and museum piec…
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Colton Hall
California's first constitution was drafted upstairs here by 48 delegates who met Sept 1-Oct 15, 1849. A soli…
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Robert Louis Stevenson House
In this 1830s boarding house, proprietor Manuela Girardin nursed her husband through the typhoid that killed…