Robert Louis Stevenson House

The adobe was built around 1836 for Don Rafael Gonzales, customs administrator at the Port of Monterey, and later became a boarding house known as the French Hotel. In the autumn of 1879 Robert Louis Stevenson took a room here, arriving ill after crossing the country to be near Fanny Osbourne, the married woman he would go on to marry. He stayed four months, from September to December, working on The Amateur Emigrant and writing his essay on Monterey, "The Old Pacific Capital," while he waited for her divorce; some have suggested that his walks along the peninsula fed into Treasure Island. As one of Monterey's oldest buildings, it saw generations of illness, death and hardship among the people who boarded here. Visitors and staff describe a lingering presence, most often a woman believed to have lived in the house during its boarding-house years. It is now part of Monterey State Historic Park, holds one of the most important collections of Stevenson's personal belongings anywhere, and is open to the public on a limited schedule.