Sonoma Plaza

Sonoma Plaza, the eight-acre square that over the last 180 years has seen religion, uprisings, revolution, fires, and now large numbers of tourists, is at the center of the region’s history and is the heart and soul of the valley. Fascinating shops and boutiques selling everything from designer clothes to African handicrafts fill the streets around the plaza, along with galleries and some of the valley’s best restaurants, many of them in historic buildings that date from the 1800s.

Sonoma Plaza was created in 1835 by General Vallejo for troop maneuvers and for a long time was little more than a muddy patch of grazing land surrounded by a picket fence. It is now the largest town square in California and, despite being thoroughly gentrified and besieged by cars, still maintains a sense of grace that only somewhere with such a rich history can pull off.

An excellent self-guided walking tour of the plaza’s many Victorian-era buildings is buried between the endless pages of advertisements in the free Sonoma Valley Guide, copies of which are usually in the Sonoma Valley Visitors Bureau on the plaza.

A few yards north of the visitors bureau is the Bear Flag Monument, a bronze statue that is roughly where the flag was raised by settlers in 1846 heralding the eventual creation of the State of California and demise of Mexican rule. Smack in the middle of the plaza is Sonoma City Hall, built from locally quarried stone with four identical sides—to give equal importance to traders on all four sides of the plaza, so the legend says. Like most civil construction projects today, the building project came in late and way over its budgeted cost of $15,000, delayed by stonemason strikes and the ballooning price of materials following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It took five years to build and was finally completed in 1909.

Almost opposite the mission entrance on Spain Street, the wobbly-looking adobe building with a long first-floor veranda is the Blue Wing Inn, a gold-rush era saloon and stagecoach stop that is thought to be one of the oldest unaltered buildings in the city. It is currently being renovated.