Live cameras in Monterey, United States

Monterey sits on the southern curve of Monterey Bay on California's Central Coast, a compact city of about 30,200 people (2020 census) spread over roughly nine square miles of hills, harbor and shoreline. Founded by the Spanish in 1774, it became the capital of the Californias a few years later, and its adobes and old customs house still recall that era. Along the waterfront, Cannery Row was once one of the busiest fish-canning districts in the world until the sardines ran out in the 1950s; today the Monterey Bay Aquarium stands at its western end.

Views here come from two very different sources. Caltrans, the state highway agency, runs public traffic cameras on the routes around the city, including State Route 1 and the roads that climb inland toward Salinas; we show their still snapshots, which refresh every few minutes. The other half of this page is the aquarium's own live streams on YouTube. The Monterey Bay cam looks out over the open water around the clock, and visitors often spot otters, seabirds and passing whales from it. The exhibit cams look inside the building:

• sea otters at play and at feeding time
• the tall kelp forest tank
• the open sea gallery with tuna, turtles and sardines
• sharks and rays gliding over a rocky reef, and drifting jellies

The aquarium lists its exhibit cams as running from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Pacific Time, so plan around that. Monterey uses Pacific Time, UTC-8 in winter and UTC-7 during daylight time from March to early November. Summer mornings are often gray and foggy, and the bay view can be a soft wall of white until the marine layer burns off; September and October tend to bring the clearest, warmest days. Winter storms make the harbor views moody, and gray whale migration passes offshore in the cooler months.

For a different angle on the same bay, look at our Santa Cruz page on the northern shore, where a NOAA buoy camera sits offshore. Next door, Pacific Grove has a winter monarch butterfly sanctuary and the Point Pinos lighthouse on its rocky shore.

Sources: Monterey, California - Wikipedia · Live Cams - Monterey Bay Aquarium · Caltrans CCTV documentation.