BY October, the hot summer weather starts to dwindle out, as autumn begins to creep in.
But if you’re looking to relive those dizzy sunshine highs, there are some fantastic short-haul holiday deals we’ve found that will cost you as little as £135 each.
October is the perfect time for some European heat to escape the chillier UKCredit: On The Beach HolidaysFrom heated pools to nearby beaches – some of these deals are from £135ppCredit: On The Beach Holidays
Temperatures in these spots still hit the mid-twenties, meaning eating al fresco is a completely normal decision rather than a cold survival test.
But a dirt-cheap package is only half the story – once you land, you still want to afford lunch or a crisp, cold beer without breaking the bank.
So, I’ve factored in local resort prices too, so your spending money goes miles further.
Hot weather, cheap booze, and a break from chilly UK – what more could you want?
1. Carvoeiro, Portugal – from £135pp
Taking the top spot on our board for the absolute cheapest October escape is Carvoeiro.
It’s the Algarve at its finest: gorgeous views over the sea, white-walled village streets, and long, lazy outdoor lunches that take up the entire afternoon.
October serves up temperatures in the mid-twenties, and local cafés serve up cold Super Bock beers for just over £2.50.
And here, you get a full spacious apartment rather than a standard hotel room.
But my favourite feature, by far, is its heated indoor pool – so if you get a rogue, overcast hour in late October, you can retreat for a warm swim without missing a beat.
Colina Village is the most affordable deal we found for a five night holidayCredit: On The Beach Holidays
2. Sunny Beach, Bulgaria – £145pp
Sunny Beach pairs a huge beach with some of the lowest local prices in Europe – local beach venues serve up large glasses of wine for just over £3, meaning you can stay out for dinner without keeping a nervous eye on your bank balance.
The early-October forecast shows reliable 24C highs, which sounds a whole lot better than putting the central heating on at home.
The kitchenette layout in these apartments is ideal for grabbing quick poolside breakfasts before heading down to the sea. Lovely jubbly.
A stay at Aparthotel Cote Da Zure is the perfect base to explore BulgariaCredit: On The Beach Holidays
3. Acharavi, Corfu – £150pp
Acharavi sits on Corfu’s scenic northern coast, serving up a gorgeous beach and a slow, authentic Greek pace. Perfect for an October wind-down.
October temperatures hover right around 23C here, and you can grab five nights room-only at Tzilios Studios for £150pp, flying direct from London Gatwick on October 13, 2026.
And I should say, room-only is the smart play here as it means you can explore the Greek tavernas for breakfast rather than sticking to a hotel clock, and evening beers with a view cost around £5.
The hotel also sits barely 400 metres from the sand and features its own quiet garden pool area surrounded by olive trees. A proper bit of me.
Have a swim in the pool before heading to a Greek taverna for an affordable dinnerCredit: On The Beach Holidays
4. Zaton, Croatia – £155pp
Zaton combines crystal-clear water with direct access to the historic streets of Zadar, where you combine beach time paired with proper local sightseeing, and October highs here regularly touch 26C.
Waterfront restaurants down by the harbour sell local draught beers for around four quid.
But back at the hotel, you get access to nine pools, a massive beach area, authentic Croatian food and top-shelf cocktails, so I wouldn’t blame you if you never left…
26C and a beer by the pool – how better to spend a holiday in Croatia?Credit: On The Beach Holidays
5. Icmeler, Turkey – £155pp
Icmeler wraps around a green, mountain-backed bay that delivers a far more relaxed atmosphere than neighbouring Marmaris – and October highs of 26C.
Local beachfront bodegas offer glasses of regional Spanish wine for around £3, with the hotel set up right by the beach and literally steps directly out onto the sand.
Playas de Guardamar is right by the beach (and some wine-selling bodegas)Credit: On The Beach Holidays
7. Manilva, Spain – £160pp
Manilva is a peaceful Costa del Sol spot built for quiet beach stops and finding low-key seafood spots that don’t charge tourist-trap prices.
Along with 26C highs in October, local tapas bars near the hotel serve up cold draught beer for under £3 a pint.
This is another hotel where you’re bagging yourself a brilliant apartment as your room, and each has a wide, covered terrace with an outdoor dining table, giving you a brilliant private space for alfresco drinks overlooking the coast.
Try Pierre & Vacances Terrazas Costa del Sol on the Costa del Sol for a quieter, less touristy resortCredit: On The Beach Holidays
8. El Arenal, Majorca – £170pp
Majorca typically holds onto 23C weather well into October, making it ideal for a low-cost break where the agenda consists purely of warm weather, a few drinks and good food.
Early this October, I tracked down five nights at Ahoi! Urban Beach for £170pp, flying direct from London Stansted on a bed-and-breakfast basis.
This deal even takes care of breakfast upfront so you can get straight out each day and local beach bars serve up pints for less than four quid.
This hotel has recently received a modern, boutique refurbishment, and it feels far sleeker than standard budget options – I love that it sits just two streets back from the main beach strip. Ideal.
Majorca doesn’t have to be expensive, and Ahoi! Urban Beach even throws in breakfastCredit: On The Beach Holidays
9. Tholos, Rhodes – £170pp
Rhodes is one of my absolute favourite spots for wringing every last drop of summer out of the year, with October temperatures comfortably averaging 24C and Tholos (also known as Theologos) on the west coast is far quieter than Faliraki, making it an ideal base for exploring the island.
You can grab five nights at Sunlight Studios for £170pp, flying direct from London Stansted on October 15, 2026 on a self-catering basis.
Local tavernas line the village in Tholos, where a large glass of local Greek wine costs around the £4 mark.
But the standout feature at Sunlight Studios is the layout: every room comes with a private balcony looking out towards the sea, allowing you to catch the famous west-coast Mediterranean sunsets right from your room.
Swap Faliraki for Tholos on Rhodes – it’s one of my favourite spotsCredit: On The Beach Holidays
10. Agadir, Morocco – £175pp
If guaranteed heat is your non-negotiable, Agadir is where I’d send you first in Autumn.
October here serves up consistent 26C sunshine alongside a massive, golden beach and a flat seafront promenade that’s ideal for evening walks.
Local prices here are remarkably cheap too – head down to the traditional fishing port and you can grab a plate of freshly grilled local fish for around 60 dirhams, which is roughly £4.80.
The hotel itself sits a short ten-minute stroll from the main beach, but the real insider win is its massive, quiet garden pool terrace.
And because it stays sheltered from Atlantic breezes, the pool gives you a perfect suntrap to tan, dip, dry and repeat all week.
Agadir has a fantastic beach to explore, and hotels are very affordableCredit: TripAdvisor
The park has also revealed what to expect from the new Minecraft World Hotel.
Inside will be 69 rooms spread across four floors, ranging from standard to premium.
Guests can expect the famous Minecraft blocks and items within the rooms, while the ‘Nether Portal’ themed lifts and mine tunnel corridors will add more to the immersive experience.
Also inside will be a Woodland Mansion themed ‘potion’ bar as well as an underwater-themed restaurant.
This is alongside other retail and dining attractions in the land as well.
An official opening date for the new land is yet to be confirmed with it being sometime in 2027.
It will be the first hotel of its kind dedicated to MinecraftCredit: ChessingtonIt will open as part of the new Chessington land next yearCredit: Chessington
Daisy Mercedes, Creative Producer at Merlin Entertainments, said: “We promised something truly special when we announced Minecraft World earlier this year, and with Minecraft World Hotel we are offering even more.
“Not only will fans be able to experience the game imagined for real life, but they’ll be also able to sleep inside it, ensuring fans respawn exactly where they want to be.
“Seeing the Minecraft World Hotel take shape alongside the attractions we are building at Chessington World of Adventures theme park is a Minecraft fans biggest dream.
“Every room, corridor and detail has been crafted with immense love for this game, the stories made within it and its community.
Trains from London to Chessington take around 35 minutes. Tickets start from £34 each.
The €10million (£8.6million) show will be packed with stunts and follows a dark force awakening on two characters’ wedding day where a battle then breaks out.
A total of €5million (£4.3million) has also been spent on upgrading the surrounding area including the De Verslaeghen Draek Inn which has a menu inspired by recipestravellers have collected from around the world.
There’s a new souvenir shop too – In den Ravenkorf – where visitors can pick up costumes, toys and other Raveleijn products.
Raveleijn originally opened back in 2011 and has been closed for nearly a year for upgrades to take place.
It will open on December 1 with a new ride and showCredit: EFTELINGThe area has been upgraded as well with refreshed restaurantsCredit: EFTELINGAnd there is a new souvenir shop as wellCredit: EFTELING
The area is themed around the story of five children who pass through a secret gate and transform into “brave riders”, according to the park.
They must then defend the city against evil.
Director of Product, Marketing & Image Koen Sanders: “The sets have been extensively revamped and Raveleijn is getting a brand-new show packed with spectacular stunts, created in collaboration with the French theme park Puy du Fou.
“At the heart of the story: when evil arises, the heroes of Raveleijn join forces.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill aimed at deprioritizing commercial logging in a unique state forest system, arguing the measure would jeopardize the ability to test best management practices.
At issue are the state’s 14 demonstration forests — managed by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire — which are billed as “living laboratories” for forest management practices. Under existing law, they’re directed to produce as much timber as can be sustained over time, while considering factors like recreation and wildlife.
Assembly Bill 2494 would have eliminated what’s often characterized as a logging mandate in favor of prioritizing values such as carbon storage, wildfire resilience and biodiversity conservation. It also would have directed state officials to seek agreements with Native American tribes to integrate their traditional knowledge into managing the land.
In Newsom’s veto message, he said the forests “produce cutting-edge strategies that inform forest management on public and private lands across California,” which is key for fighting climate change and improving wildfire resilience.
“By narrowing the management of these forests to a limited set of public benefits, this bill risks the state’s ability to fully demonstrate the best science-based practices,” he wrote Friday. “At a time when California is racing to keep pace with a rapidly changing climate, we cannot afford to lose the flexibility needed to safeguard our forests for future generations.”
The move deals a blow to a grassroots coalition that included tribes, environmentalists and mountain bikers, some of whom have fought for decades to rein in logging at Jackson Demonstration State Forest in Mendocino County. In recent years, activists have staged protests and tree sits, harkening back to the “timber wars” of the 1980s and ‘90s.
The bill grew in part out of discussions with constituents who wanted to see the forest run differently, according to its author, Assemblymember Chris Rogers (D-Santa Rosa).
Rogers, who represents the North Coast, called Newsom’s veto message “nonsensical” and said it didn’t reflect the language of the bill.
“Current law says that the guiding principle for the management of the forests is maximum sustained production of high-quality wood products,” he told The Times. “That’s much more narrow as a directive on how to manage those lands than by expanding it to include biodiversity, carbon sequestration, research, recreation.”
Polly Girvin, who pushed for changes at Jackson along with her late partner and tribal leader Priscilla Hunter, said the fight will continue under California’s next governor. She wants to see Native Americans take an even stronger leadership role going forward, pointing to rights afforded to them by state law.
“Our local tribal voice is not pro-logging; it’s really to keep the world in balance, to honor the cries of the ancestors, to try to save the trees from commercial logging,” said Girvin, a retired attorney focused on Native American law.
Leaders in Mendocino and Humboldt counties backed the measure. Humboldt County Supervisor Steve Madrone saw it as codifying practices that could help rebuild trust in the community, which he said Cal Fire had lost.
“It was not going to restrict it from being able to do all kinds of things,” he said. “Frankly, it was going to be better than just letting them kind of focus on board feet.”
Cal Fire’s Kevin Conway, who oversees the state’s demonstration forests, said he could not comment on the measure.
The bill was opposed by the Rural County Representatives of California, an advocacy group representing 40 counties, along with many in the timber and agriculture industries.
Staci Heaton, senior policy advocate for RCRC, echoed Newsom’s concerns that the legislation would have limited what could be done in the forests to achieve resilience, such as the ability to harvest trees of different sizes and types. She said they also had concerns about the funding structure and what she described as vague definitions in the bill, which could invite litigation.
“We appreciate the governor signaling that we’re going to continue to use sound forest management in California,” Heaton said.
Asked about the disagreement among some counties, she said there tends to be “more of a split in what people think good forest management looks like” when it comes to coastal redwood forests.
“We maintain that a lot of our forests really aren’t healthy in their current condition, and there’s too many straws in the ground, and there does need to be, in some areas, more aggressive management,” she said.
COMSTOCK, Texas — The Trump administration has started building a border wall through a west Texas section of the Big Bend region, marking the first major construction in an area of the U.S.-Mexico border where the administration’s plans have met heavy, bipartisan opposition.
The start of construction marks a milestone in the administration’s $46-billion efforts to line the border with walls, barriers, roads and technology as it seeks to make good on a campaign promise by President Trump to finish the wall. And it comes as Customs and Border Protection says it has doubled the pace at which it is building the wall across the border.
Customs and Border Protection said in a statement to the Associated Press that “border wall panel installation is underway” in a 47-mile stretch of Hudspeth County in west Texas known as Big Bend 1. There are five project areas that make up the roughly 500-mile Big Bend region stretching from an area of Hudspeth County south of El Paso to Lake Amistad.
CBP said the first panels were erected Wednesday. On a map on the agency’s website where it posts updates of wall construction along the southern border, a photo showed a crane lifting one of the 30-foot-tall steel wall panels into place as construction workers looked on.
The new activity was separate from a border infrastructure project in the nearby Big Bend National Park, where the administration has suspended construction in an attempt to reach out to opponents.
In the broader Big Bend region of Texas, CBP has run up against concerted opposition from landowners, environmental groups, business owners and ranchers who say the remote region isn’t a high-traffic area for illegal immigration. Political leaders from both parties, including U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), have joined the opposition.
Activists said Friday they would continue opposing the border infrastructure projects in the rest of the Big Bend region, even as the panels were being installed.
Clara Benson, one of the founders of the No Big Bend Wall Coalition, which has been fighting against CBP’s plans, said in an interview Friday that the organization had been receiving reports of trucks moving supplies into the remote area along the Rio Grande and that contractors had been clearing yards to stage supplies.
Speaking from Washington, D.C., where she and others in the coalition were meeting with lawmakers, she said that the organization and others would continue to fight the wall-building plans across the region.
“We will continue to fight for this land no matter what the outcome is. We will continue fighting to the end,” said Benson. “You talk to people in west Texas and they say even if they put it up, we’ll fight for them to take it down. So this fight is not over.”
The news comes as the administration is speeding forward with a plan to line the entire border with a combination of 30-foot-tall steel bollard walls, barriers designed to stop vehicles from crossing the border, new patrol roads, and various technologies to deter and detect migrants or smugglers from crossing the border.
Customs and Border Protection said it is building an average of 12 miles of barriers per week along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico and recently reached a milestone of 200 miles of new barriers built since the second Trump administration took office. The 12-miles-a-week average is double the pace that the agency’s head, Rodney Scott, cited earlier this year.
The agency has faced opposition from environmental groups, a small town that worries the wall will cause flooding in its area, Native Americans who say the construction is disturbing sacred sites and landowners who say the construction will infringe on their land.
In Texas, much of the opposition has centered on the agency’s plans for Big Bend National Park, in the state’s southwest on the Rio Grande that is a draw for tourists from around the world. But up- and downriver outside the park, much of the land is owned by private landowners, many of whom have organized against the government’s efforts.
Earlier this week, landowners, ranchers and business owners in the Big Bend region along with a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the region’s landscape and heritage sued to stop the administration’s plans.
Activists and landowners have also shown up at county meetings to push their elected officials not to cooperate with contractors hired by CBP to build the wall, and many landowners have refused to allow government officials or contractors onto their land to survey it.
In La Palma Park Stadium in Anaheim, a month before the Bay of Pigs invasion, 7,500 students and parents skipped school or work and gathered to learn about communist plans to take over the United States.
“Right now, we have a 50-50 chance of defeating the communist threat,” Herbert Philbrick, a former FBI agent, told the crowd on March 8, 1961. “Each day our chances grow less.”
Walter Knott, of berry-farm fame, sponsored the five-day “Christian Anti-Communist School” to help Orange County see the world that he saw, one where big government and liberalism led to Soviet domination.
The message stuck. Within the decade, Orange County would have 38 chapters of the conspiracy-minded, ultra-right-wing John Birch Society, which called Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower a “communist tool.” Knott and actor John Wayne were members, as was the county’s congressman.
The rightward mobilization during the suburban explosion of the 1960s gave Orange County a national reputation for hard-line conservatism with a crackpot edge — “nut country,” in the words of Fortune magazine.
The county’s deep pockets funded right-wing candidates and movements throughout the nation. At home it spawned popular but ultimately doomed measures such as the Briggs Initiative in 1978 to ban gays and lesbians from working in public schools, and Proposition 187 in 1994, which would have denied public services to immigrants in the country illegally.
The Republican Party reached its peak in the Reagan era and has been slowly losing its membership edge since 1990, as the diversity of Los Angeles and the world at large started to bleed through the so-called Orange Curtain.
Source: California Secretary of State
(Priya Krishnakumar / Los Angeles Times)
Registered Republicans today outnumber Democrats by only 2 percentage points, down from 22% at the peak, with a large contingent of self-declared independents positioned to swing elections either way. The GOP has a chance of losing four congressional seats in the county in Tuesday’s midterm election. If so, it would be the first time since the 1930s that Orange County would be without Republican representation in the House.
A GOP loss of even one or two seats would be significant, not as a turning point so much as a powerful sign of change — hastened by dislike for President Trump — in this one-time heart of American conservatism.
Source: Political Data, Inc.
(Priya Krishnakumar / Los Angeles Times)
::
Orange County seceded from its northwestern neighbor, Los Angeles, in 1889, led by fiercely independent ranchers, sheepherders, beekeepers, citrus growers and crop farmers who had bristled under the control of a rich city 30 miles up the rail line.
The county then was a constellation of small farm and dairy towns in the north and scattered resort towns along the coast. In the south, the basin tapered off into a narrowing valley between the Santa Ana Mountains and the coastal San Joaquin Hills, where sheep and cattle ranches had thrived since California was part of Spain and Mexico.
Americans had taken over the ranchos in the late 19th century after a devastating drought left many old landowners of Spanish ancestry, the Californios, broke.
Lewis Moulton was one of the Yankee migrants. He came from Boston in 1874 and grazed sheep on the open range from Oceanside to Long Beach. Family lore has it that natural gas seeps were so rich in some spots that, as he camped, he would light them to cook his breakfast.
After two decades of renting land, he and a Basque shepherd, John Pierre Daguerre, had enough money to buy Rancho Niguel, which they eventually expanded to 22,000 acres. It was rugged, isolated country, good mostly for grazing. The cheapest land was the steep part near the coast, between what would become Laguna Beach and Dana Point — about $15 an acre. Today, small fractions of an acre go for double-digit millions.
In the second half of the 20th century, these backwater ranchers and farmers, the Moulton family, the O’Neills, Floods, Irvines, Segerstroms, would physically and culturally shape Orange County into the suburban giant it is today.
But there was always an underclass that made their dreams work.
Tenant farmers — often with roots in Mexico, the Basque country or in California before the American conquest — rented spots on these ranches to graze and grow barley. Others toiled as hands for the landowners.
In the north, they lived in segregated barrios in Santa Ana, Westminster, Anaheim and Garden Grove — where their children attended separate “Mexican schools” until a federal appeals court ruled them unconstitutional in 1947. In the south, they made up smaller communities in El Toro and San Juan Capistrano.
Stephen Rios stands in the doorway of the adobe house in San Juan Capistrano built by his family in 1794.
(Mark Boster / For The Times)
“My tata got killed right there by the train when he was 93 years old,” Stephen Rios said of his grandfather, an American Indian named Mochanai, as he sat in his front garden across from the Mission San Juan Capistrano. “He was a vaquero, a well-known horse trainer.”
Rios’ family worked for the Moultons and O’Neills and lived in the adobe house built in 1794 for their ancestor Feliciano Rios, who came to California as a Spanish soldier and married an American Indian woman.
Rios, an attorney, inherited the home from his father and lives there today. His son’s bedroom has the ceiling boards that the famed bandito Joaquin Murrieta, a family friend known as the Robin Hood of El Dorado, would lift to hide in the attic in the 1850s. A flat-screen TV sits below them now.
The American Indian, Californio and Mexican residents of their dirt street — the oldest neighborhood in California — were conservative. “They loved their families, their church,” he said. “They loved their pieces of land. They were strong, religious independent people.”
Republicans reigned during the rural era. The land barons did not want labor organizers anywhere near their field hands.
When orange pickers walked out of the orchards in 1936, the strikers were arrested and beaten by police and mobs. The Times reported “old vigilante days were revived in the orchards of Orange County yesterday as one man lay near death and scores nursed injuries.”
Changes in Orange County’s 948 square miles — physical, demographic and political — have always rolled from north to south. While the Rios family was still living in the cowboy era, World War II brought rapid transformation to the northern part of the county.
The military needed more West Coast bases to fight the Japanese, and the open space between Long Beach and San Diego was perfect. The government built bases in Seal Beach, Los Alamitos, Santa Ana and El Toro.
Defense contractors and other big manufacturers followed: Hughes Aircraft, Rockwell, Ford Aeronutronic, Boeing, American Electronics, Beckman Instruments.
The farmers and ranchers became developers, or sold their land to other builders, creating vast tracts of homes across the northern end of the county from Huntington Beach to Fullerton. In this era of big cars and backyard barbecues, houses turned inward. Garages replaced porches and picture windows; neighborhoods were quiet.
The newcomers, many from the South and Midwest or white-flighters from Los Angeles, converged at church.
::
At its core, Orange County held a tension between Midwestern traditionalism and California’s drive for reinvention.
The midcentury suburbs in the north were libertarian-leaning enclaves, yet living on Washington defense spending, and listening to a sunny California-bred gospel of self-empowerment and prosperity.
An Iowan named Robert Schuller put out a newspaper ad in 1955, “Come as you are … In the family car!”
He preached from the roof of the snack bar at the Orange Drive-in theater, not about fire and brimstone, but about “possibility thinking” with catchphrases like “Turn your scars into stars.”
Robert Schuller, who delivered a new type of self-healing Gospel to the country, at the new Crystal Cathedral in 1980.
(Tony Barnard / Los Angeles Times)
Schuller’s congregation boomed, becoming one of the nation’s first megachurches. His “Hour of Power” television sermon beamed across the country. In 1980, he built a glass church longer than a football field, the Crystal Cathedral.
Orange County birthed hugely influential ministries that mixed God with conservative politics: Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, Greg Laurie’s Harvest Crusade, Paul and Jan Crouch’s Trinity Broadcasting Network and Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church.
“The megachurches reinforced and marinated the conservatism coming out of the defense plants,” said Fred Smoller, associate professor of political science at Chapman University.
Orange County’s open space and space-age technology, coupled with fervent entrepreneurship and an-edge-of-the-continent mentality, let tinkerers and visionaries experiment with minimal regulation.
This was a suburban county that, like no other, reached deep into popular culture.
Knott’s Berry Farm was the nation’s first theme park. Disneyland became one of the world’s biggest destinations. The ministries reached millions. South Coast Plaza shopping mall would draw more people from around the world than Disneyland. The Irvine ranch grew into the largest planned city in America. Leisure World became the first retirement community.
Leisure World resident Jerry Wyss enjoys the pool in 1999.
(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
In new coastal towns such as Dana Point and San Clemente, Hobie Alter, Gordon “Grubby” Clark and John Severson (living next door to Orange County native Richard Nixon in his “Western White House”) helped create a whole new culture around an ancient Polynesian sport that would become a multibillion-dollar surf industry.
In Laguna Beach, Tom Morey, a Douglas Aircraft composites engineer, invented the bodyboard. In Anaheim, the Van Doren brothers opened the first Vans store.
And the likes of Knott and Anaheim’s Carl Karcher, the founder of Carl’s Jr., would help give America a new brand of conservatism, with their friend John Wayne in Newport Beach to embody it.
With the Cold War at its peak in the 1960s, families in Orange County, so many of them in the military or defense industry, heeded their call.
“At living room bridge clubs, at backyard barbecues, and at kitchen coffee klatches, the middle-class men and women of Orange County ‘awakened’ to what they perceived as the threats of communism and liberalism,” wrote Lisa McGirr, a professor of history at Harvard, in “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right.” “They became the cutting edge of the conservative movement in the 1960s.”
“The lack of a large organized working class and the near absence of racial minorities made it likely that Orange County’s political rainbow would consist of relatively few colors.”
The quiet homogeneity of the walled and gated communities allowed politicians to exploit fears of the outsider — whether they be African Americans from Los Angeles, immigrants from Mexico, or gays, Muslims and Koreans.
“The anti-minority stuff accelerated political careers here,” said Smoller, the political scientist. “We have a history of sending some real oddballs to Congress.”
An early one was Rep. James Utt, who in 1963 warned about the United Nations training “a large contingent of barefooted Africans” in Georgia to take over the country.
Cementing this conservatism: its daily newspaper, the Register, and its libertarian owner Raymond C. Hoiles. He had once waged war against a measure to improve mental health care in Alaska because he said it was a communist plot to brainwash Americans in concentration camps.
In 1964, Pat Donnelly, a young aerospace engineer working at McDonnell Douglas, bought a small home in Buena Park for $18,500. His neighbor’s first admonition to him: They must help ensure no blacks, Mexicans or Catholics moved in.
Donnelly was a Catholic, and even worse, a union-card-carrying Democrat who once played guitar and banjo in a touring folk band. He and his wife had two girls and joined the St. Pius V Church on Orangethorpe Avenue and started a choir. With his own slice of suburbia, he became more concerned about taxes and grew more conservative.
“I didn’t like some of the stuff I was seeing in the cities, the drugs and crime. It seemed like people were abusing welfare. I was paying for that.”
He switched parties and never looked back.
After Orange County’s favorite candidate Barry Goldwater lost to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, Republican rainmakers turned their attention to Reagan’s run for governor. His first political fundraiser was at a home in Anaheim, and the county would nurture his ambitions the rest of his career.
By the 1970s, developers had reached deep into south Orange County. The Irvine Co. had wound down its cattle operations and was parceling out its 185 square miles of land. Some 1,500 acres near Newport Beach would become UC Irvine. The company developed a master plan for a city to grow around the university, which would incorporate in 1971.
The Moultons sold their land soon after to developers who would build Laguna Hills, Laguna Woods, Laguna Niguel and Aliso Viejo. In their yards, homeowners would find rattlesnakes that wandered out of the wild canyons and steep hillsides between subdivisions.
To the east and south, the O’Neills’ vast scrubby land would give way to even newer, posher cities such as Rancho Santa Margarita, Ladera Ranch and the community of Coto de Caza — the setting for the “Real Housewives of Orange County.”
With all this construction, Stephen Rios’ 225-year-old adobe home is hemmed in by suburbia.
The “Los Rios District” is now on the National Register of Historic Places and is highly sought-after real estate for its quaint atmosphere.
Most of the old Californio families sold and moved on.
“Everyone else wants to live here now,” Rios said.
Jared Mathis, left, and Scott T. Barnes stand off the trail in the Aliso and Wood Canyon Wilderness looking over the 22,000 acres that their great-grandparents bought in the 1890s.
(Mark Boster / For The Times)
Lewis Moulton’s great-grandson, Jared Mathis, came back from a job back east to Laguna Hills to manage the family’s remaining holdings. A few years ago, he took his dad — who moved away in the 1970s — for a drive to look at the old ranch where he grew up.
But his father couldn’t get his bearings. All the landmarks were gone, the hills terraced, new trees and houses blocked once wide views. “They say they moved more dirt building Aliso Viejo than they did digging the Panama Canal,” Mathis said.
Mathis drove his father to the ridgeline of Laguna Beach. From there, you could see the whole ranch area, smell the laurel sumac in Aliso Canyon, glimpse some old corrals in the distance, get a grip of the topography. The white striations of terraced neighborhoods faded in the haze. The twin peaks of Modjeska and Santiago, called Old Saddleback, framed the view, as they did in most of the county, one thing that never changed.
“He could see where they had the old roundups,” he said. “That was a powerful image for him.”
As development moved south, the older, northern parts of the county lost some of their luster. The affluent white Republicans drifted to the shinier places depicted in shows such as “The O.C.”
The explosion in South County home construction created thousands of jobs. “The people building all of those houses were Latino,” said Smoller, the political science professor. Like the old tenant farmers, they helped families such as the Irvines realize their dreams.
Thousands of other Latinos would follow to work in service jobs in these wealthy new areas.
The humming economy overall and good schools also lured professional and middle-class Latinos to the northern neighborhoods that Anglos were leaving in their migration south.
In Santa Ana in the 1970s, the population of Latinos went from 40,000 to 90,000. Today, Latinos account for 78% of Santa Ana’s population. Northwest Orange County looks a lot like Southeast L.A. County. La Habra is 57% Latino; Anaheim, 52%; Buena Park, 40%; Garden Grove, 37%.
The other big factor that brought demographic change was seeded 53 years ago, when the federal government removed racist quotas on immigrants from Asia, and Greater Los Angeles became a major destination for Koreans and Chinese.
In 1975, after Saigon fell, 50,000 South Vietnamese landed in nearby Camp Pendleton, and conservative Orange County stepped up to take the anti-communist refugees.
The Register called on churches and citizens to sponsor these newcomers. They were put up in apartments in neglected parts of Westminster and Garden Grove still surrounded by bean fields.
Soon the fields and dilapidated commercial strips gave way to bustling places such as Saigon Market and Hoa Binh Market, ushering in a wave of new Vietnamese businesses that would revitalize the area.
Frank Jao started off in America selling Kirby vacuum cleaners in Whittier. Within a year, he moved to Garden Grove, became a real estate agent, then developer, first building a shopping mall in Westminster with the help of Chinese investors.
So many Vietnamese storefronts were opening in Westminster, changing its look so rapidly, that more than 100 residents signed a petition calling for the city to stop issuing business licenses. It was an ugly time.
“Anyone driving on Bolsa would more than occasionally be confronted by drivers who rolled down their windows and asked us to roll down ours, and they’d give us the middle finger,” recalled Jao, now 70. “When we’d go to work in the morning, we’d find the windows shot out by BB guns.”
His buildings became the core of Little Saigon, notably its landmark Asian Garden Mall. His company built $400 million worth of shopping centers and apartment buildings throughout Orange County and beyond.
Upscale Chinese families took to Irvine. Many had left China because of the lack of opportunities for their children to attend college, and this master-planned community, built around UC Irvine, was a huge draw, as it was to moderately affluent Koreans, Iranians and Latinos. Irvine is nearly 40% Asian now.
Koreans had begun trickling in from Los Angeles during the 1980s, seeking better schools. The 1992 Los Angeles riots, in which many Korean store owners lost their businesses, sped up the flow. They often stuck close together, moving into specific neighborhoods in Garden Grove, Fullerton and Buena Park.
The Asian influx has also contributed to the reordering of politics in once reliably Republican Orange County.
As a whole, Asian Americans are more likely to register as “no party preference” and vote based on specific issues, not party, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of political science and public policy at UC Riverside. They leaned Republican during the Reagan era and well into the 1990s while subsequent generations moved to the left.
“About one-third of Asian Americans voted for Clinton in 1992,” Ramakrishnan said, “but two-thirds voted for Obama in 2008.”
He said in the last five years strong GOP outreach to the community in Orange County — and encouragement of Asian Americans to run for office — has brought many back to the party. But Ramakrishnan said too many factors are at play to say how they will vote on Tuesday. An example: They don’t like Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, but Vietnamese, Taiwanese and Koreans like his confrontational stance toward China.
In Buena Park, Pat Donnelly, still a Republican, met a Korean American estate attorney named Sunny Park — a Democrat — at his Lion’s Club. He came to realize she had values he admired: honesty, a family focus, strong work ethic. Now he’s campaigning for her as she runs for City Council.
Park had followed her aging Korean clients from Los Angeles, moving into the affluent and increasingly Korean Bellehurst neighborhood. When she knocks on doors, many white people have offered support. But some have grumbled “No Koreans” and shut the door in her face.
A couple weeks ago, she started seeing campaign signs that said “No Sunny Park, Carpetbagger.”
She says the message that sends the Korean community is that she — and by extension they — are not from here and they shouldn’t try to take part in politics.
The political dynamic in Orange County is not so much a rising blue tide, but an ebbing red one. Since 1999, registered Democrats rose by less than 2 percentage points to 33.6%, while Republicans have fallen 14 points to 35.6% of voters. The wave is of independent voters who increased in numbers nearly as much as the Republicans fell.
A majority of Latinos vote Democrat, and growth in their community has buoyed the party. While they tend to be more socially conservative, they favor more lenient immigration policies, social programs that help the poor, strong unions and high minimum wages.
Historically, turnout has not matched their share of the population, but some Republican strategists fear Trump’s derogatory comments about Mexican and Central American immigrants might motivate them this year.
In 1996, the anti-immigrant rhetoric surrounding Proposition 187 helped end the ultra-right Orange County Republican Bob Dornan’s political career, and put Democrat Loretta Sanchez in Congress.
Just like the development, the diversity and Democratic edge are pushing south in this county of 3.2 million people.
In 2002, Democrats outnumbered Republicans only in Santa Ana, Buena Park and Stanton. Now they do in 11 cities reaching down to Irvine.
In Laguna Niguel, Candy Antone, 47, said Democrats such as her essentially lived in the closet until recently. She would go quiet when a Republican friend or neighbor would go on a political rant. “You just had to bite your lip,” she said.
But Trump is repelling even many Republicans here. “Democrats are coming out of the woodwork,” Antone said. “People we’ve known for years, we’re just finding out they’re Democrats.”
CORON, Philippines: The bodies of passengers killed in a ferry fire off the Philippines arrived at a port near the resort town of Coron, Palawan on Saturday morning, as the country’s coast guard warned the death toll of 35 would grow.
AFP watched tents being set up to accept 30 bodies brought from the M/V June Aster, which ran aground near the tourist hotspot after a fire erupted Wednesday evening and tore through the vessel “in seconds”.
Coast guard spokeswoman Noemie Cayabyab told a Saturday press conference the remains would be turned over to police forensic investigators for “proper disposition and identification” before allowing local authorities to inform family members.
“Currently, we are focused on the retrieval, and after that we will proceed with the investigation,” she said, confirming the bodies had been found in the ship’s economy accommodation area.
Police investigators were seen arriving at the port shortly after the press conference ended.
Asked how many bodies remained aboard the ship, she said authorities would provide an update later in the day.
Cayabyab told AFP on Friday evening that the first transfer had been capped at 30 bodies due to the capacity of the patrol vessel transporting them and that additional cadavers remained on the ferry.
Five others had been confirmed dead in the immediate wake of the fire.
Photos released by the coast guard showed rows of body bags being placed into a small ship alongside men in hazmat suits.
Thirty passengers and 13 crew have so far been rescued, while 54 people remain unaccounted for.
On Friday, Cayabyab had told a radio station the fire had begun in the cargo hold, then tore through the ship within seconds.
“From the time that they heard the loud explosion, the appearance of smoke, and then fire. It spread very quickly,” she said of survivors’ accounts.
“Everything happened in seconds,” she said, adding that those who made it off the ship had not even had time to put on life jackets.
‘Lost hope’
Myra Cabilan told AFP she had flown to Coron to find her missing brother, 40-year-old Rammel Gonzaga, who had taken the ferry from Manila on a business trip with his brother-in-law.
“His wife had just given birth a month ago. He was so happy he was given a daughter,” Cabilan said, fighting back tears.
“At dawn, I still believed he survived. But he’s still missing. I have lost hope.”
Hundreds of people desperate for news about the incident have taken to leaving comments on the Facebook page of a local mayor, searching for relatives, friends and even a dog.
The ferry’s manifest listed 134 crew and passengers, but two had not boarded, according to the coast guard. The ferry was also carrying goods, an electric vehicle, a pickup truck, and motorcycles.
The archipelago nation of 116 million has a long history of disasters involving the inter-island ferries that ply its seas.
Many rely on cheap and poorly regulated boats and ships for transport between the country’s more than 7,000 islands, despite regular accidents.
In January, a triple-decker ferry carrying more than 340 people sank off the southern Philippines, killing at least 52 people.
The M/V Trisha Kerstin 3 sank along nearly the same route where 31 people died in 2023 after a fire broke out aboard the Lady Mary Joy 3 ferry.
On Thursday, the company that owns the M/V June Aster, Atienza Interisland Ferries Inc, said it was fully cooperating with the investigation.
