In a letter dated September 6, 1784 , Pedro Fages, then governor of Alta and Baja California, observed an “active volcano” below present-day Hope Ranch, which he described at the time as the stretch of coastline between Santa Barbara and a large Chumash settlement in the Goleta Slough.
“Throughout this site, the ground is so hot one cannot approach it,” he wrote. “It burns continuously in more than 30 places, like geysers that exude dense smoke. From its stench it appears to be from sulfur.” Santa Barbara historian Michael Redmond recalled Fages’s letter in a 2011 column for the Independent.
It wasn’t actually a volcano that Fages observed, but a solfatara, or “fire well” — naturally occurring fissures that give off sulfurous gases and steam. Another was discovered in 1835 at Rincon, which by the 1880s was sending out flames 10 feet high and flinging rocks into the air before going dormant.