Watsonville, California

Everything Watsonville is known for

2 songs mention this city 1 artist from here

Music in Watsonville

Songs About Watsonville

highway 101
jackson taylor band
9%
Beer Run
Todd Snider
2%
"At the KPIG Swine and Soiree Dance"

Artists From Watsonville

D
DarkRoom Familia
latin Pop: 36

Rivers & Roads in Song near Watsonville

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Watsonville.

U.S. Route 101 7 songs Guadalupe River 9 songs Interstate 5 13 songs

History of Watsonville

Mystery Spot RoadyGoat

1940

Up a winding road at 465 Mystery Spot Road in the hills above Santa Cruz, California, sits the Mystery Spot, a roughly 150-foot circle where balls seem to roll uphill and people appear to lean impossibly without falling. Landowner George Prather opened it to the public in 1940 (after the strange effects were noticed in 1939), making it one of California's first 'gravity-defying' tourist attractions. Honest note: there's no broken physics here. UC Berkeley psychologists have explained it as a tilt-induced visual illusion, the slanted cabin (canted about 20 degrees) and the surrounding sloped, tree-screened ground rob your brain of true vertical and horizontal references, so your sense of balance gets fooled. The effect is genuinely convincing, even when you know exactly how it works. The trademark bumper stickers have been spreading the mystery since the 1950s.

15.4 mi away

A Cannonball That Floats RoadyGoat

Quicksilver is heavy in a way that defies common sense. A jug of it the size of a milk carton would weigh as much as a couple of bowling balls, because mercury is about thirteen and a half times denser than water. That extreme density leads to a trick that looks like magic: solid iron floats on it. Float depends only on which thing is denser, not on which feels heavier in your hand. Iron is dense, but mercury is far denser, so an iron cannonball set on a pool of mercury bobs on the surface instead of sinking. A common brick floats too. Even a chunk of lead rides high. Only a handful of the heaviest metals, gold among them, are dense enough to sink. So a Gold Rush miner could rest a heavy iron ball on this silvery liquid and watch it sit there, refusing to go under.

18.7 mi away

The Red Rock That Painted History RoadyGoat

Before anyone here wanted the mercury, people wanted the rock it hides in. Cinnabar, the ore mercury comes from, is a brilliant scarlet, and that's no accident of New Almaden alone. Ground into fine powder, cinnabar becomes vermilion, one of the most prized red pigments in human history. Artists have reached for it for an astonishingly long time. Traces of it appear at a Neolithic settlement in modern Turkey from around eight thousand years ago. Romans painted villa walls with vermilion mined at Almaden in Spain, the very mine that gave New Almaden its name. Chinese artisans used it on lacquer and ceramics. Long before quicksilver mattered to gold miners, this same blood-red ore was crushed into the color of emperors and frescoes. The local Ohlone knew it too, using the red stone as paint, which is exactly how the mine here was first recognized.

18.7 mi away

Things to Do in Watsonville

quirky 14.3 mi away
Mystery Spot

A gravitational anomaly where balls roll uphill and people stand at weird angles. Or is it an optical illusion?

Everything Near Watsonville

30 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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