You may be familiar with Naples, Florida, and Naples, Italy. But what about the unincorporated area of Naples in Southern California?
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Spanning a whole mile of ocean frontage just northwest of Santa Barbara, the largely undeveloped 1,000-acre oceanfront property known as Naples Ranch offers the opportunity to create a unique vision—with some caveats. The vast coastal spread, currently used for cattle ranching, comprises more than 220 legal parcels, plus an 18-acre lake where you can go bass fishing.
On the market for a cool $70 million with Kerry Mormann at Berkshire Hathaway Home Services California Properties, Naples Ranch (also known as Santa Barbara Ranch) has a long, fascinating history. For thousands of years, the land was under the stewardship of the local Chumash tribe, but the Naples name comes not from them but from a planned city that was never actually built there: An 1888 subdivision map shows the rolling acreage crisscrossed with streets lined with about 500 individual lots. However, because of its relatively remote location, lack of infrastructure, and the economic realities of the time, the imagined city never came to fruition…