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Fourteen-thousand acres of privately owned and virtually undeveloped land, located 30 miles north of Santa Barbara, California, featuring almost nine miles of pastoral wave-filled coastline.

Adjacent to the surf world's most densely populated surf zone—the Southern California coast from San Diego to Santa Barbara—the fiercely protected Hollister Ranch has for decades been viewed by most American surfers as a kind of inaccessible earthly paradise. About 100 surfers own property on the Ranch, and another few hundred sometimes boat in from the south when the surf is up. Tens of thousands, meanwhile, stand by and hope the state will eventually open the Ranch up to public access.

About a dozen high-quality reef- and point- breaks are located on the Ranch between Gaviota to the south and the tip of Point Conception (part of the adjacent Bixby Ranch) to the north. Among the best breaks are the long and beautifully paced rights of Cojo Point, the short, pinwheeling tubes at Rights and Lefts, and Little Drakes. Cojo is one of the few Ranch spots that works best during the southwest swells of late summer and early fall; most of the breaks require cold-season swells from the west and northwest. The Channel Islands effectively block incoming swells from the south, and Ranch waves in general are smaller than those found to the north and south, rarely getting above eight feet. The prevailing westerly wind blows up to 30 miles per hour but strikes side-offshore at some Ranch breaks.

Named after Colonel William Hollister, from Ohio, who bought the land piece by piece in the years following his arrival from Ohio 1854, the Hollister Ranch was owned and farmed by the same family for four generations. In 1959, a group of 20 Santa Barbara surfers, including board manufacturer Renny Yater, formed the Santa Barbara County Surf Club for the express purpose of gaining access to the Ranch; part of the club's deal with the Hollister family was to post a guard at the south entrance to keep other surfers from gaining access. Apart from Yater, surfer-designer George Greenough is the person who spent the most time surfing the Ranch during the 1960s, and they remain the surfers who are best associated with the area.

In 1965, the Hollister family sold the 14,000-acre "home" portion of their land for $12.5 million dollars; by 1971 the property was owned by the MGIC Investments, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and it was announced that 100-acre parcels—135 in total, each priced between $100,000 and $400,000—would soon be up for sale. As before, the Ranch would remain off-limits to the public.

The landmark 1976 California Coastal Act required that the public have "maximum access" to the state's entire coastline, the Ranch included, but wealthy and well-connected Hollister owners not only managed to keep the law from being acted upon, but also made their corner of the world virtually disappear. "Hollister Ranch" doesn't appear on most California road maps, and there are no Hollister off-ramp signs along Highway 101. Surfers can legally boat into the channels near the breaks, or walk in along the beach from below the high-tide line. Once in the surf, however, they are generally given a cold reception by property-owning surfers.

The Ranch first came to the surf world's attention in John Severson's 1961 surf film 

 but the surf media by and large ignored the area until later in the decade. 

 first wrote in detail the Ranch in 1968, describing the oak- and canyon-lined coast as "clean and raw and silent, with the best waves to be found anywhere in America proper." 

 also warned that trespassers would be prosecuted "to the limit of the law" by a local parcel-owning judge. Until the late 2010s, even state workers looking to take official surveys of the land were denied access. "The place has a certain reputation for heavy localism," surf writer Justin Housman wrote in 2020, "but it’s really of the legal kind. Once you’re in, you’re in, for the most part. Without owning a parcel or knowing a guy who does, however, getting in takes a whole lot of effort, and the sparse crowds reflect that."

In 2019, Assembly Bill 1680 was signed into law, and the state was at that point directed to open the Ranch to the public, in some form, by 2022. In March of that year, however, the agencies tasked with creating a plan to open the Ranch reported that the April 1 opening-day deadline would be missed and that a required Environmental Impact Report would take at least another 18 months. Meanwhile, the Ranch remains private.

The "Malibu" scenes from Warner Brothers' 1978 surf movie 

 were filmed at Cojo Point. The Ranch has occasionally been featured in surf movies and videos, including 

 devoted to status items among various groups, access to the Ranch was cited as the ultimate signifier of surf status.

Ranch, The

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