Avila Beach

Point San Luis breaks the prevailing northwesterly winds, which is why Avila Beach runs warmer than almost anywhere else on the Central Coast — a sheltered south-facing cove that earned its reputation honestly. What's here now, though, is essentially a new town: in the late 1990s, Unocal's cleanup of decades of oil seepage under the township required razing several blocks of Front Street and hauling over 6,750 truckloads of contaminated material to a Bakersfield landfill, replacing it with clean Guadalupe Dunes sand. The town that came back is tidier than the one that left.