By Southern California is meant California south of the Teháchapi Mountains and their western prolongation ending in Santa Barbara County at the sea. It is not a political division, but Nature’s—in its physical aspect differing quite markedly from Central and Northern California. Long regarded with a sort of mild contempt by the Americans who settled Central California and who habitually spoke of the South as “the cow counties,” Southern California has in the last quarter century attained a reputation not short of gilt-edged. Lonely, treeless plains and valleys and brush-clad mesas that a comparatively few years ago were counted desert and good for nothing except for cattle ranges and sheep runs, have become, with the development of water, pleasant lands of fruitfulness supporting a numerous and progressive population. The extensive cultivation of the orange, the lemon, the fig, the grape, the English walnut, the apricot, the olive; the planting of the eucalyptus, the palm and a hundred kinds of exotic shade and ornamental trees; the dotting of the landscape with villas of a distinguished sort of architecture patterned on Italian and Spanish models—all this has wrought a transformation that makes even more appropriate today than 25 years ago the sobriquet of “Our Italy” given the region by Charles Dudley Warner. Here wealthy Easterners maintain winter homes as they keep summer estates on the Atlantic Coast, and less well-to-do folk—retired farmers, tradesmen or professional people—buy a bungalow and settle down to the enjoyment of a good climate and the luxury of having roses and green peas in their winter gardens. Not only Americans but those of other nationalities have discovered that Southern California totals a remarkable number of points in the problem of comfortable living—a healthful and delightful climate (notably in winter), a fruitful soil capable of raising everything natural to the temperate zone besides a large number of things sub-tropical, a beautiful and varied terrain embracing seaside, valley and mountain, and an admirable system of capital roads. For the tourist there is not only the attraction of this beauty and comfort, but there is the drawing of historic interest, touched with that indefinable sense of romance that attaches wherever Spain has had a foothold. In Southern California as elsewhere in the Southwest, that Spanish flavor is very evident, manifested in the presence of a considerable Spanish-speaking population, in the remains of Spanish-built Missions and ranch houses, and in the persistence of Spanish geographic nomenclature.