Moss Landing: Whales, Sardines, and the Smokestacks on the Bay

If you've driven Highway 1 between Monterey and Santa Cruz, you've seen Moss Landing, even if you didn't stop. It's the little harbor town with the two giant smokestacks, sea otters floating in the slough, and a row of antique shops and seafood restaurants along the water. Only a couple hundred people live there, but the town has gone through more booms than places many times its size. For a lot of us who live on the Peninsula, it's a pass-through town, a place to stop for gas or the occasional seafood dinner on the way somewhere else. But it has more history than you'd guess from the highway.

A landing on the bay

Ohlone people lived around Elkhorn Slough for thousands of years, and archaeologists believe people may have lived here as long as 4,000 years ago.

The town gets its name from Charles Moss, a retired ship captain from Texas. In 1866, he and Cato Vierra built a 200-foot wharf where the slough meets Monterey Bay. Farmers from the Salinas Valley sent their crops down to the landing, and ships carried them on to San Francisco. The place was simply called "Moss" for years, and the post office didn't take the name Moss Landing until 1917.

The 1906 earthquake destroyed the wharf and much of what had been built, but the town kept coming back.

Whales, then sardines

Around 1917, a whaling station opened at Moss Landing. Whales were hunted offshore and processed here, which is hard to imagine today in a place known for whale watching.

By the early 1930s, a fish cannery had replaced the whaling station, and Moss Landing joined the sardine boom that was making Cannery Row famous in Monterey. When the sardines disappeared in the late 1940s and 1950s, the canneries and warehouses here emptied out too. Some of the old industrial buildings sat empty for years afterward.

The harbor and the slough

The Moss Landing Harbor District formed in 1943, and after the channel was dredged, the harbor officially opened in 1947. It's still a working harbor, with commercial fishing boats alongside pleasure boats and research vessels.

Behind the harbor is Elkhorn Slough, one of the largest wetlands in California. It's home to sea otters, harbor seals, and hundreds of bird species, and kayaking the slough is one of the best ways to see wildlife anywhere on the bay.

That combination of harbor, wetland, and the nearby Monterey Submarine Canyon made Moss Landing a center for ocean science. Moss Landing Marine Laboratories was founded in 1966. Its building was destroyed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and rebuilt nearby. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute moved here from Pacific Grove in the 1990s.

One of the newer efforts is the Sunflower Star Laboratory, a nonprofit in Moss Landing working to bring back the sunflower sea star. Starting in 2013, a sea star wasting disease killed an estimated 95% of sunflower sea stars worldwide, and they all but disappeared from much of California. That mattered beyond the sea stars themselves, because they eat purple sea urchins, and without them, urchins have mowed down huge areas of kelp forest. The lab has been raising young sea stars in captivity, and this year, lab-raised sunflower stars began going back into the ocean. I got to visit the lab once, and seeing these sea stars up close, knowing how close they came to disappearing, was a really cool experience.

The smokestacks

In 1950, PG&E opened the Moss Landing Power Plant. In 1964, two new units were added, along with the two 500-foot smokestacks that became a landmark you can see from all around Monterey Bay. At its peak, after new units came online in 2002, it was the largest power plant in California.

The units connected to those famous stacks were retired at the end of 2016 because they were no longer competitive. The stacks are still standing, but they haven't been part of daily operations for years, which is part of why the plant can look quieter than its size suggests.

More recently, the site became home to large battery storage facilities. In January 2025, a fire broke out in one of the battery buildings and burned for days, leading to evacuations and a long cleanup that's still underway. Damaged batteries reignited in September 2026 during that cleanup work. Some residents have raised concerns about contamination and health effects from the smoke, while health officials have said the levels measured weren't a threat to public health. Either way, it left a lot of locals skeptical of large battery facilities, and the long-term future of the site is still being worked out.

What it means if you're buying in Moss Landing

Moss Landing is tiny, and homes for sale there don't come up often. If you're considering the area, a few things are worth knowing:

• It's unincorporated. Moss Landing is part of unincorporated Monterey County, so the county handles permits and planning.
• Coastal rules. Being right on the coast and the slough, many properties fall under coastal zone rules, which can affect what you can build or change.
• Flood and hazard checks. With homes near the harbor and slough, it's worth checking flood zones and other hazard maps for any property you're looking at. See the Buyer's Guide chapter on insurance, fire, and flood.
• The power plant site. Many buyers will want to understand the status of the battery facility cleanup. Your agent can point you to the latest information from the county.

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Sources: Wikipedia, Moss Landing, California, and Moss Landing Power Plant; Moss Landing Chamber of Commerce; Santa Cruz Local (September 18, 2026); California Ocean Protection Council (March 2026); SFGATE (2026).