Tunitas Creek Beach Opens Aug. 17 With 80 Parking Spots
San Mateo County opens Don Horsley County Park at Tunitas Creek Beach on August 17 after nine years and about $24 million. It has a mile of sand, three trails and 80 parking spaces, which is the part that decides who actually gets to use it.
Over one weekend in August 2015, volunteers cleaning up Tunitas Creek Beach counted 170 cars parked along the shoulder of Highway 1. When the beach opens Monday as a finished county park, the lot will hold 80.
That gap is the whole story of California coastal access, and it is the thing worth knowing before you drive out there.
Don Horsley County Park at Tunitas Creek Beach, 58 acres and nearly a mile of sand midway between Half Moon Bay and Pescadero, opens at 8 a.m. on Monday, August 17, 2026. There is no entrance fee. There is also no lifeguard, no dogs allowed, and no bus that stops anywhere near it. After nine years, two landslides and an opening date that moved at least three times, the hard part of visiting California’s newest public beach is going to be the parking lot.
What nine years and about $24 million bought
The county spent roughly $24 million turning a private, unmanaged property into a working park, and the receipts are public. Here is the park as it actually opens.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Opens | Monday, Aug. 17, 2026, 8 a.m. (seasonal closing times) |
| Size | 58 acres, nearly one mile of beach |
| Parking | 80 vehicles, bluff-top lot |
| Entrance fee | None |
| Trails | Mid-Bluff 0.5 mi (ADA accessible), Schilling 0.6 mi, John Pitcher 0.1 mi |
| Total project cost | About $24 million |
| Land purchases | $5 million by POST (Nov. 2017), $3.2 million by the county (March 2020) |
| Not allowed | Dogs, fires, camping, alcohol, amplified music, smoking |
Read that list next to the price and the shape of the project comes into focus. Most of the money did not buy the beach. The land cost $5 million when the Peninsula Open Space Trust bought it in November 2017 and $3.2 million when the county bought it from POST in 2020. The rest went into the unglamorous work of making a cliff safe to walk down: a $11.59 million construction contract approved June 13, 2023, plus $4.71 million in State Coastal Conservancy grants and more than $12 million in private gifts raised by POST.
The beach was never inaccessible. It was ungoverned.
People have been going to Tunitas for decades. What they did not have was a way down that was not a rope.
Old access meant pulling onto the shoulder south of the Highway 1 bridge and taking a steep, eroded trail down the bluff, with fraying ropes for the last stretch. The beach got popular on social media as a camping spot, and the results were ugly. The Pacific Beach Coalition’s own cleanup logs are the clearest record: 11 volunteers hauled out about 400 pounds of debris in December 2014, and by August 2015 a single cleanup pulled 1,000 pounds, with volunteers describing human waste in buckets, in the creek and on the sand.
In June 2017 the Board of Supervisors moved an ordinance making fires, overnight camping, alcohol, fireworks, firearms and amplified music misdemeanors at the beach, with a dusk closure. Don Horsley, then board president and now the park’s namesake, put it bluntly in the Mercury News: “this type of outrageous behavior in recent years shows that some visitors cannot be trusted to regulate their own actions using common sense and basic courtesy.” Five months later POST bought the property, and the long conversion began.
Three years closed, and a hillside that kept moving
Construction started August 14, 2023 and the site closed to the public with a 10 to 12 month estimate attached. It took three years. A January 2024 slide took out roughly a third of the beach access trail. In June 2025 two more slides undercut the only emergency access road, and the county pushed the opening to summer 2026. The Coastal Conservancy added $950,000 in February 2026 to stabilize the slopes.
That is not a scandal, it is what building on an actively eroding marine terrace costs. It is also a reasonable preview of how this coast behaves. If you are looking at property anywhere on the Coastside, the bluff is not scenery, it is a maintenance item.
Eighty spaces, no bus, and the arithmetic of a Saturday
There is no scheduled bus service to this beach, and that is the single most important practical fact about it.
SamTrans fixed routes on the coast end in Half Moon Bay. Everything south of town is served by SamCoast, an on-demand curb-to-curb ride you have to book one to seven days ahead, for $4.25, with weekend hours of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. That is a real service and it does cover Tunitas. It is not a beach shuttle.
So the practical capacity of the newest public beach in the Bay Area is 80 cars at a time, roughly eight miles south of Half Moon Bay and about 40 miles from San Francisco. On a warm Saturday in September that lot fills early, and the shoulder parking that used to absorb the overflow is exactly what the park was built to stop. Go on a weekday morning if you have the choice. Everyone who tells you otherwise has not tried to park at Gray Whale Cove in July.
The rules that will catch people out
Four things surprise first-time visitors, and all four are worth knowing before you load the car.
Dogs are not allowed, under county ordinance 4778, which also bans fires, camping, alcohol, smoking and amplified music. There are no lifeguards, and county staff are direct about the surf here. The north end of the beach is fenced from March through September for western snowy plover nesting, so the walkable stretch is shorter in summer than the mile on the map. And the park opens at 8 a.m. daily but closes on a seasonal schedule, so check the posted time rather than assuming sunset.
The trail system is short and well thought out. The half-mile Mid-Bluff Trail is the ADA-accessible route to an overlook, and if you are bringing someone who is not going to manage a bluff descent, that overlook is the destination, not a consolation prize.
Why the coast scores lower on amenities than people expect
A new beach is a real amenity, but it is one you drive to, and the San Mateo coast already shows what that does to a neighborhood’s daily-life score. Pacifica is the coastal city we rank, and across its 11 neighborhoods the average amenities score is 3.2 out of 5, with not a single neighborhood reaching 4.0. Rockaway Beach tops the list at 3.7. Inland, San Mateo averages 3.7 and six of its 23 neighborhoods clear 4.0.
That 0.5-point gap is not a judgment on the coast. It is a measurement of distance. Amenities scores reward what you can reach on foot in a few minutes, and coastal towns trade that for the ocean at the end of the street. Nobody moves to Montara for the errand radius.
Which is the honest limit on what opened Monday. Don Horsley County Park changes the weekly rhythm for people already living on the Coastside, in Half Moon Bay and El Granada and Moss Beach and the ridge communities off Tunitas Creek Road. For everyone else it is a day trip, and a good one. It does not move a score, and it should not move your read on a listing.
Go on a Tuesday, and notice what did not get built
If you have been waiting on this beach, the first week will be crowded and the parking lot will be the bottleneck, so aim for a weekday morning and use the Schilling Trail from the lot rather than circling.
The larger thing worth sitting with is the asymmetry. In nine years this stretch of coast produced a permanently public mile of sand, a paved lot, restrooms and three trails, and almost no new homes. San Mateo County has gotten very good at protecting coastline and stayed very bad at letting people live near it, which is why Pacifica’s median sits at $1.35 million as of July 2026 and the Coastside stays a place most people visit. We spend a lot of time at Houseberry arguing that the area decides how a home actually lives, and this is the version of that argument nobody enjoys: the amenity got built, and the housing next to it did not.
Bring a jacket. The fog does not care that the park is new.
Sources
San Mateo County Parks, project updates and construction timeline
San Mateo County Parks, Tunitas Creek Beach regulations (Ordinance 4778)
San Mateo County, landslides delay opening (June 18, 2025)
Peninsula Open Space Trust, Tunitas Creek Beach acquisition (Nov. 2017)
Pacific Beach Coalition, 1,000 pounds of trash at Tunitas Creek (Aug. 2015)
The Mercury News, Crackdown targets bad behavior at Tunitas Creek Beach (June 8, 2017)
SamTrans, Coastside services and SamCoast
Bay Nature, A new beach park is opening in San Mateo (Feb. 2025)