About Gaviota Preserves
Our Mission
Our mission is to acquire, restore, and care for extraordinary lands on the Gaviota Coast whose future cannot be taken for granted. We bring conservation, regenerative agriculture, and thoughtful community engagement together so these places remain protected, productive, and alive for generations to come.
Our History
Gaviota Preserves was created to build the philanthropic support and long-term stewardship capacity needed to secure the future of Rancho Tajiguas Preserve. Our work builds on Gaviota Coast Conservancy’s September 2024 acquisition of this 3,272-acre landscape, encompassing the Tajiguas Creek watershed, native habitats, working agricultural lands, and historic resources.
Gaviota Preserves is a California nonprofit public benefit corporation recognized as tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3). Our initial focus is raising funds to retire the Preserve’s acquisition debt and support its enduring conservation and stewardship. Gaviota Coast Conservancy owns the property. Gaviota Preserves provides essential funding for the Preserve’s operations and is working to secure its enduring conservation and stewardship.
Our Vision
Rancho Tajiguas Preserve offers a vision of what lasting conservation on the Gaviota Coast can become: a place where extraordinary natural beauty, ecological restoration, working agriculture, cultural heritage, and public learning flourish together.
Its 3,272 acres encompass an entire coastal watershed within a globally significant biodiversity hotspot. Native habitats and historic structures share the landscape with avocado and persimmon orchards and hundreds of acres of grazing lands. Soil-building and carbon sequestration activities are underway, and a conservation easement is being developed to strengthen the property’s permanent protection.
We envision thoughtfully managed public access and educational opportunities that allow people to experience this spectacular landscape and understand the relationships among healthy watersheds, wildlife, agriculture, climate, and human history.
Retiring the acquisition debt will create the foundation for enduring stewardship and allow this work to grow. As these efforts mature, Gaviota Preserves can become an institution equipped to hold and manage additional conservation properties on the Gaviota Coast.
Our vision reaches beyond a single preserve: a growing network of protected landscapes, each cared for according to its distinctive character, together sustaining the coast’s biodiversity, working lands, and opportunities for discovery—for present and future generations.