Half Moon Bay — Big Waves, Pumpkin Fields, and Silicon Valley Money

What Actually Makes Half Moon Bay Different

Half Moon Bay is not a resort town that happens to have a harbor -- it is a working harbor town, and later a resort, built on top of a farming economy that predates the surf culture and the tourism by more than a century. The area was first settled under Spanish land grants in the 1840s as an agricultural outpost tied to Mission San Francisco de Asís, initially known as San Benito before its growing Anglo fishing community renamed it "Spanishtown"; the town took its current name, Half Moon Bay, in 1874, and it wasn't incorporated as an independent city until 1959, per local historical accounts corroborated by the San Francisco Peninsula's own tourism history pages. That relatively late incorporation date matters -- much of the surrounding Coastside farmland and coastline stayed unincorporated San Mateo County land for generations, which is part of why so much agricultural land survives immediately adjacent to town today rather than having been subdivided decades ago.

Two things put Half Moon Bay on a map most Americans recognize, and both are real, specific, and well documented rather than marketing gloss. The first is Mavericks, a big-wave break just off Pillar Point that was first discovered in March 1961 by a group including Alex Matienzo, Jim Thompson, and Dick Knottmeyer -- along with a German Shepherd named Maverick, which gave the break its name -- and considered unsurfable until 17-year-old local Jeff Clark paddled out alone in 1975 and rode it. Clark reportedly surfed Mavericks essentially by himself for roughly 15 years before word spread and other big-wave riders started showing up; a photo by his friend Steve Tadin that ran in Surfer magazine is widely credited with putting the break on the sport's map. The danger here is not hypothetical: veteran big-wave surfer Mark Foo drowned at Mavericks on December 23, 1994, his leash reportedly tangled on the rocky bottom, and waterman Sion Milosky died in a 2011 session. On December 23, 2024 -- exactly 30 years to the day after Foo's death -- surfer Alo Slebir caught a wave at Mavericks the World Surf League officially measured at 76 feet (23.1 meters), among the largest waves ever ridden anywhere, though short of the current world record of 86 feet set at Nazaré, Portugal in 2020.

The second real, documented identity is the Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival, inaugurated in 1971 as the "Spanishtown Art & Pumpkin Festival" and renamed in 1973. It drew roughly 15,000 people in its first year and now draws more than 100,000 over its two-day October run, held on Columbus Day weekend and anchored by the Safeway World Champion Pumpkin Weigh-Off. The festival didn't invent the area's pumpkin identity -- it grew out of a real, working agricultural economy: brothers John and Clarence Arata began growing pumpkins on their land decades ago in what's now one of the town's oldest and largest pumpkin operations, Italian immigrant Dante Dianda earned the nickname "the Artichoke King" for his 1930s farming success on the same coastal terraces, and Andreotti Family Farms has operated since 1926. That farmland still exists, still gets farmed, and still sits inside city limits or immediately adjacent to them -- a genuinely unusual thing to find this close to Silicon Valley's job centers.

That proximity to Silicon Valley is the other half of the story, and it's a real economic tension, not incidental color. Half Moon Bay is roughly 25 to 40 minutes from downtown San Francisco and 35 to 75 minutes from Peninsula tech hubs like Palo Alto and Mountain View depending on traffic and route, connected by two roads -- coastal Highway 1 and cross-mountain Highway 92 -- that both regularly see fog and slowdowns rather than a freeway. That relative inaccessibility has kept Half Moon Bay from becoming a bedroom-community sprawl extension of the Peninsula, but it has not kept prices down: median home sale prices have run in the $1.5-1.7 million range across recent market-tracker snapshots, driven by Bay Area income levels competing for a genuinely small, geographically constrained housing supply squeezed between the ocean and the coastal mountains.

That tension between an agricultural, working-class economic base and Silicon Valley-adjacent wealth surfaced in the worst possible way on January 23, 2023, when a gunman opened fire at two mushroom farms roughly three miles apart in Half Moon Bay, killing seven farmworkers and attempting to kill an eighth. Federal investigators subsequently found the farm owners had illegally deducted pay from workers to house them in cramped cargo containers, garages, and a moldy, insect-infested greenhouse, and ultimately paid more than $450,000 in back wages and damages plus $70,000 in civil penalties. This is not typically part of a Half Moon Bay tourism pitch, but it's a real, documented fact about the labor conditions underlying the area's agricultural charm, and this page states it directly rather than pretending it away. Several other facts were not independently confirmed at a level this page is willing to state as settled: a specific current Half Moon Bay insurance premium as opposed to statewide ranges, the exact combined current property tax rate for a specific parcel (California's Prop 13 system means two neighboring, similarly-priced homes can carry very different assessed values and tax bills depending on purchase date), and a precise current bluff-retreat rate for any single street. Confirm current figures directly with the San Mateo County Assessor, a California-licensed insurance broker, and the City of Half Moon Bay's Planning Division before making a purchase, relocation, or investment decision.