Live cameras in Laguna Beach, United States

Laguna Beach is a seaside city in southern Orange County, California, set between steep coastal hills and about seven miles of Pacific shoreline broken into dozens of small beaches and rocky coves. The town is small, home to roughly 23,000 residents when the 2020 count was made. In the early 1900s plein-air painters such as William Wendt and Edgar Payne settled in the town, and the Laguna Beach Art Association they helped found in 1918 grew into today's Laguna Art Museum. Galleries still line the coast road, and the town remains proud of its identity as an art colony.

Summer is festival season. The Festival of Arts runs its juried fine art show in July and August, and each evening the Pageant of the Masters recreates famous paintings on stage with real people posed as the figures, a tradition dating from 1933. Across the road, the Sawdust Art Festival, started in 1965, fills a shady canyon lot with booths of local artists. Main Beach, with its boardwalk and basketball courts, is the center of town, and Heisler Park follows the bluffs above tide pools just to the north.

Coast Highway and Laguna Canyon

These are Caltrans traffic cameras, posting still images every few minutes. Only two state highways serve the town. State Route 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, runs along the shore from Newport Beach to Dana Point, and State Route 133, Laguna Canyon Road, winds inland through the canyon toward Irvine and the freeways. On summer weekends both roads fill with beach and festival traffic, and the canyon road is the place to watch when visitors leave in the late afternoon.

Local clocks are set to Pacific Time, an hour later in the warm half of the year. The weather is mild, with foggy mornings in early summer and warm, clear days in early fall. Because the coast faces the open ocean to the west and southwest, sunsets here are a local ritual, around eight in midsummer and before five in December. Dry Santa Ana winds raise the risk of fire on the hills, as in the 1993 fire that destroyed hundreds of homes.

Crystal Cove State Park lies just up the coast, and the harbor at Dana Point is a short drive south.

Sources: Laguna Beach, California - Wikipedia · Caltrans QuickMap.