Santa Monica Live Cam, Los Angeles, California

Is the beach in Santa Monica crowded right now, and is the surf flat or breaking? The Santa Monica live cam answers both in a couple of seconds, with two cameras on Santa Monica State Beach, the stretch of sand along Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica, California, west of downtown Los Angeles. The player switches between the two views with the buttons below it, and both stream live. They sit with the other California webcams on the site.

How big is Santa Monica State Beach?

Bigger than it looks on any single camera. The beach runs for about 3.5 miles and covers 245 acres of sand, managed jointly by the City of Santa Monica and California State Parks. The Santa Monica Pier stands at the foot of Colorado Avenue, roughly in the middle, which splits the shoreline into the north and south beach parking lots that locals use as landmarks, from Lot 1 North to Lot 5 South.

A bike path of about three miles follows the sand from Will Rogers State Beach in the north to Venice Beach in the south, with a separate walking path beside it. E-scooters are not allowed on the beach bike paths, the pier or Ocean Front Walk, so on the Santa Monica beach cam the traffic along the sand is bikes, skaters and runners. Like all the live cams from around the world on the site, the feed is free and needs no sign-up.

Is it safe to swim at Santa Monica Beach today?

That depends on the lifeguards more than on the weather. The beach is guarded by the lifeguard division of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, and in a single summer in 2016 they made 1,666 ocean rescues there. Most involved swimmers caught in rip currents or surprised by inshore holes, spots where the depth drops suddenly a few steps from the shore.

The live stream helps with the first check: how big the sets are, whether the water is choppy and how many people are already in it. For anything official, the City of Santa Monica’s beach page lists the beach rules, the parking lots and the amenities, from volleyball courts to restrooms.

Searches for a Santa Monica surf cam show how many people use the feed this way, checking the lines of swell before deciding whether to paddle out or simply sit on the sand. In 2016 the beaches counted around 6.9 million visits between late May and mid August alone, which explains why lifeguards treat summer weekends as their busiest stretch of the year.

What can you see from the Santa Monica Pier?

The pier is the landmark everyone looks for on the Santa Monica Pier webcam. The first section opened on September 9, 1909, mainly to carry sewer pipes past the breakers, and in 1916 Charles Looff and his son Arthur built the Pleasure Pier next to it. Today the combined structure is about 1,651 feet long.

Its carousel, built by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company in 1922 with 44 hand-carved horses, turns inside the Looff Hippodrome, and both are on the National Register of Historic Places. Pacific Park, the amusement park on the deck, opened on May 25, 1996, as the first new attraction on the pier since the 1930s, and its Ferris wheel runs on solar panels and lights up after dark.

The pier has survived a lot. Storms in 1982 and 1983 swept away the breakwater and destroyed more than a third of the structure, and the city rebuilt it. It was named a Santa Monica Historic Landmark in 1976 and has appeared in films from The Sting to Forrest Gump.

Older layers of the pier’s story are gone from view. The La Monica Ballroom, which opened in 1924 with room for 5,000 dancers, was demolished in 1963, and the 1934 breakwater that sheltered up to 100 fishing and pleasure boats disappeared in the 1983 storms. The bridge and entry gate that lead onto the pier from Ocean Avenue were built in 1938 by the Works Project Administration, and at the far end Heal the Bay runs a small aquarium.

On the Orange County coast, the Huntington Beach Pier live cam shows another of Southern California’s long piers, about an hour’s drive south.

What to check before heading to the beach

Dogs are not allowed on Santa Monica State Beach, and the closest legal dog beach the city points to is Rosie’s Dog Beach in Long Beach. The Metro E Line now runs all the way to downtown Santa Monica, a few blocks from the pier, which saves the search for a space in the beach lots on busy days. Either way, a quick look at the Santa Monica live cam before leaving shows how full the sand already is.