Welcome to Healdsburg
Healdsburg is a town of around 11,000 in Sonoma County, just off Highway 101. It’s a small, tourist community that attracts visitors from the Bay Area, the rest of California and the rest of the world, and for good reason. With its small town charm and great location off the main Highway Healdsburg it is a great place to live and play.
Lay of the land
Healdsburg is just south of Simi and sits on Highway 101 and near Highway 128. With cool, wet winters and long, dry summers, Healdsburg is a wine-growers paradise, and for this reason, the town is often named one of the top 10 smallest towns in America. With a 19th century plaza in the center of the town, it provides a beautiful meeting point for locals and tourists alike. Surrounded by lakes, rivers streams and outdoor recreational areas, Healdsburg is a great place to enjoy the beauty of Northern California.
Downtown is not anything too large, and it’s charming and hard to get lost. People love to visit Healdsburg to enjoy the slower pace, trees and fresh air. Since Healdsburg has been around a while, it’s a great town to enjoy the older buildings and architecture. Simply put, with so much history, which is rare in California, Healdsburg offers a charm unseen in the rest of the area.
Transportation
The draw of Healdsburg, besides what has been mentioned, is the location. Right off Highway 101, one can get to Santa Rosa in 20-minutes by car or 40 minutes by bus. The Bay Area cities of San Francisco and Oakland are a little over an hour away. By taking Highway 116, it’s also easy to get to the ocean and small communities along the way. Highway 128 connects residents of Healdsburg to other towns and cities in the area, and it makes it easy to get to Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. Yes, when living in Healdsburg, it’s easy to get anywhere, and pretty quickly too.
Local Highlights
As mentioned, Healdsburg has been rated a top 10 town to live in by many magazines and publications, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a wine-growing region that is popular with visitors and locals alike. One thing that sets it apart from other towns in the area is the location. Right off Highway 101, it’s easy to get to other amazing cities and towns along the way. But, this doesn’t mean that Healdsburg is boring.
With cool, wet winters and long and dry summers, not only is it a great area to have a winery, but it’s a nice area to enjoy the outdoors. It’s a lot greener than most of the state, and residents, along with wine tourists, love to visit Healdsburg and the Healdsburg Ridge Open Space Preserve. This little gem is not well-known but that is okay for people who live in the area. At Healdsburg Ridge Open Space Preserve, you can let your dog enjoy nature, and you can hike and walk around on one of the many trails. If you are a mountain biker, you are sure to appreciate the nearly empty trails. It’s best to go right before sunset to take it all in.
While there is so much to explore out of the town, there is a lot to enjoy in Healdsburg. With so many restaurants, Healdsburg is a culinary paradise, and locals love to take advantage of it to the fullest. In fact, due to its location in the wine-growing region of Sonoma County, this small town has more great restaurants than some bigger and more established cities in the Bay Area.
