Highway 1 road status Two fires burning on this coast Check the fires & road →
The Plaskett Family

More than a century on the Big Sur coast

Places

Camaldoli

New Camaldoli Hermitage, in the Santa Lucia Mountains two miles inland of Highway 1 and three-quarters of a mile south of Lucia. Founded in 1958 by Camaldolese Benedictine monks sent from the thousand-year-old motherhouse at Camaldoli in Tuscany, who spent two years searching for a site combining solitude and natural beauty; they bought 600 acres of the old Lucia ranch. Mabel Plaskett wrote about the new foundation in December 1959, when it was barely a year old. It is still here: about a dozen monks in walled cells with private gardens, a guest ministry and retreat house open to anyone, a bakery, and a bookstore.

Stories set here

mabel article

History of Coast Schools

Part one of her history of the coast schools — starting with the Redwood School of 1878, built of notched logs without a single nail.

The people of Camaldoli

Everyone the family archive records in the story of this place. Descendants: if one of these is yours, we’d love to hear from you.

Keep in touch with the coast and the family

Pick what you want to hear about. You will only ever be emailed about the things you tick.

Send me
Other things we write about

We send you a link to confirm it is your address, and nothing is saved until you click it. Every email has an unsubscribe link. Your address is not passed to anybody else.