"I want to see a terrace back here again," then-San Clemente Mayor Chris Duncan told a television crew standing in what used to be Casa Romantica's outdoor amphitheater, back when the space was still a mess of compacted dirt and heavy equipment. That was the spring of 2023, weeks after a bluff slide took out a chunk of the property's ocean-facing terrace and gardens. Three and a half years later, the terrace he was talking about is finally open again. So are four of the gardens around it. The amphitheater he was standing in when he said it is still gone.
If you have not walked up the hill to Casa Romantica lately, here is the short version: the historic house at the top of the bluff never really closed. The ground underneath a good chunk of its outdoor space did, and getting it back has happened in pieces, on two very different timelines, for reasons that have more to do with construction logic than bureaucratic slowness.
What's Actually Open Again
As of September 1, 2026, the Ocean Terrace and several of the surrounding gardens have partially reopened to the public. That includes the Native American Garden, the Spanky Chang Children's Garden, the Story Circle, and the Roscoe Chang Edible Garden. Combined with the Main Salon and interior rooms, which came back on October 4, 2024, that means most of what a first-time visitor pictures when they think of Casa Romantica, the tiled rooms, the courtyard, the ocean view off the terrace, is walkable again.
Still closed: the Amphitheater, the Woodland Garden, and the Native Bowl.
That is not a small asterisk. The amphitheater in particular was the piece of Casa Romantica that most people who grew up here have some memory of, a wedding, a concert, a school field trip sitting on the sloped lawn facing the pier. It is also the piece that took the most direct damage, and understanding why matters if you are trying to figure out when, or whether, it comes back on a schedule anyone can count on.
Why the Terrace Came Back Before the Stage Did
The landslide itself happened in April 2023. Staff noticed cracks in the terrace, and about ten days later a section of it slid down the hillside along with parts of the native plant gardens. To get heavy machinery close enough to stabilize the slope, crews had to demolish the amphitheater's stage and cut a temporary road through the garden. That is the detail that explains everything that came after: the amphitheater was not just storm damaged, it was deliberately torn down so the rest of the property could be saved.
That distinction is the whole reason the recovery has moved at two speeds. The terrace and the gardens sat on ground that needed to be regraded and proven stable before anyone could safely stand on it again, and once the city's engineers signed off, the hardscape and plantings could go back in roughly the shape they were before. In June 2026, the city announced that Phase I of the cliff stabilization work was complete, which is what cleared the way for September's reopening. The amphitheater is a different kind of project. There is no original stage to repair. Whatever goes back there has to be designed and built from nothing, on a footprint the city is still figuring out, funded separately from the grading work.
The city put $8.5 million into regrading and rebuilding the slope itself, money that went toward dirt and drainage, not toward rebuilding a performance space. The nonprofit that runs Casa Romantica launched its own "Building Hope, Preserving History" campaign in 2023 to cover everything the city's infrastructure money does not, and executive director Amy Behrens was blunt about what the closure cost the organization in real dollars. Rental income from weddings and events at the terrace had been subsidizing the cultural programming, and losing that income stream for an extended stretch put a nonprofit that runs on a comparatively modest budget in a genuinely difficult spot. "We were hoping to have wedding ceremonies in our amphitheater," Behrens said, describing exactly the kind of booking that funded the free public programs Casa Romantica is known for.
So when the terrace opened but the amphitheater did not, that was not an oversight. Public garden access came back on the city's construction timeline. The event space that generates private revenue is waiting on a design and a fundraising push that has not been fully resolved yet.
The Closure Rebuilt the Collection, Not Just the Building
One thing the slow timeline made possible: the Main Salon that reopened in October 2024 is not the same room it was before the landslide. Staff used the closure to pull pieces out of storage that had never been on public display, including California Impressionist and plein air paintings from the organization's own collection. A Hallway of Memories now holds Greek vases and a collection of vintage teacups from the Swinden Family Collection. A section on the Acjachemen people, the land's earliest inhabitants, is part of the rotation now too.
The detail that will land hardest with anyone who spends time in the water here: historic photographs of old-school San Clemente surf culture, sourced from the nearby Surfing Heritage and Culture Center, now hang in the same rooms where Ole Hanson once ran the real estate business that built this town. Hanson, a former Seattle mayor turned developer, built the house in 1927 as the model for the "Spanish Village by the Sea" he was trying to sell the rest of San Clemente on. He lost the property to foreclosure during the Depression in 1934, and the city eventually acquired it, restoring it into the nonprofit cultural center that opened to the public in 2003. It has been on the National Register of Historic Places for years and pulls in around 40,000 visitors annually, landslide notwithstanding.
What There Is to Actually Do This Fall
If you are looking for a reason to go back this month rather than waiting for the amphitheater news, there is a real calendar here, not just a reopened building.
Coffee Concerts run the third Friday of most months, a partnership with San Clemente's own High Tide Coffee where the coffee shop supplies complimentary drinks and Casa Romantica supplies the Main Salon and the musicians. If you want the full coffeehouse version rather than the once-a-month concert, High Tide's actual shop is a short drive north at 1624 North El Camino Real, open daily from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The Casa Romantica Book Club meets next on September 23, 2026, discussing "The Island Club" by Nicola Harrison, with a November 18 meeting already on the calendar for "Daughters of the Sun and Moon" by Lisa See.
The bigger family draw lands on November 1, 2026, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., when the Fall Harvest Festival takes over the grounds as part of the free Family Sundays series, with apple cider, a pumpkin hunt through the reopened gardens, and seasonal activities built for kids.
General admission is $8 for adults. Kids 12 and under get in free, as do active military with ID and Casa Romantica members. Admission is free for everyone on the first Sunday of every month, which this fall lands on October 4 and November 1, the same day as the Fall Harvest Festival.
A logistics note worth knowing before you go: the city's summer trolley still runs daily through September 28, after which it drops to a Friday-through-Sunday schedule for the rest of the fall and winter. Stop 17, at Del Mar and Granada, is the one to look for. On-site parking is free but limited while construction continues nearby, so the Pier Bowl lots or the spaces near the Community Center and Library are worth having as a backup.
Casa Romantica's own online calendar is the place to confirm dates before you drive over, since programs and hours can shift.
None of this means the story is finished. The amphitheater's absence is still the thing longtime residents notice first when they walk the grounds, and there is no announced date for when that changes. What is true right now, in September 2026, is that more of Casa Romantica is open than has been open in years, the collection inside it is genuinely different from what it was before the slide, and there is a real, dated reason to plan a visit before the year is out.
We live in this town too, and we like watching the places that make it feel like itself come back one piece at a time. If you want more of what is actually happening in San Clemente right now, not the version everyone else already wrote, Habig Homes keeps an eye on it so you do not have to.
