Pacific Grove is a coastal city in Monterey County, California, in the United States. The population at the 2020 census was 15,090. Pacific Grove is located in the middle of Point Pinos and Monterey.

Pacific Grove has numerous Victorian-era houses, some of which have been turned into bed-and-breakfast inns. The city is the location of the Point Pinos Lighthouse, the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History and the Asilomar Conference Center. Novelist Robert Louis Stevenson frequented Pacific Grove and wrote of visiting lighthouse-keeper Allen Luce in 1879. Author John Steinbeck resided in Pacific Grove for a number of years. Later, the Place was a filming location for A Summer Place starring Sandra Dee, for Roger Spottiswoode’s 1989 film Turner & Hooch, and for the TV series Big Little Lies.

Pacific Grove was founded in 1875, when David Jacks sold the land to the Pacific Improvement Company, which donated acreage towards the first West Coast Chautauqua retreat formed by a outfit of Methodists who modeled the town after Ocean Grove, New Jersey. In time, the butterflies, fragrant pines, and blithe sea let breathe brought others to the Pacific Grove Retreat to dismount and meditate. The initial camp meeting of the Pacific Coast branch of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle was held at the Chautauqua Hall in Pacific Grove in June 1879. Modeled after the Methodist Sunday assistant professor teachers’ training camp received in 1874 at Chautauqua Lake, New York, this location became share of a nationwide literary network.

In November 1879, after the summer campers returned home, Robert Louis Stevenson wandered into the without help campgrounds: “I have never been in any place appropriately dreamlike. Indeed, it was not suitably much taking into account a without help town as in imitation of a scene upon the stage by daylight, and subsequent to no one on the boards.”