A new report shows more than a million people visited two National Parks on the South Coast in 2018, contributing more than $84 million dollars to the region’s economy. In the past year, 867,000 people visited the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation, and an estimated 366,000 visited Channel Islands National Park.
The number of visitors to the National Recreation Area was impacted by the Woolsey Fire last November. The nearly 100,000 acre blaze in Ventura and Los Angeles Counties charred 88% of the federal land in the park. The report shows that nationwide, 318 million park visitors had a $40 billion dollar impact on the U.S. economy.
