Pismo Beach Shore Cliff, California Live Cam

The Shore Cliff Hotel stands on the bluff at Pismo Beach, and the webcam looks along the cliff to the surf below it. The town is on the central coast of California, roughly midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The place is named after a clam. Pismo clams were dug here by the lorryload into the 1940s, ploughed out of the sand at low tide, until the beds gave out; the limit now is ten a day and they are hard to come by.

A eucalyptus grove at the south end of town takes monarch butterflies from November to February, clustered so thickly on the branches that they pass for dead leaves. Counts there ran into the tens of thousands in the 1990s and have fallen a long way since.