There comes a time driving either north or south on california Route 1 where you round a bend and Morro Rock just slaps you in the face. It's unavoidable. The rock itself is a volcanic plug, the remnant of the neck of a volcano. In 1769, a Spanish explorer, Juan Crespi, noted in his diary that “we saw a great rock in the form of a round morro”. According to Google Translate ‘morro' means ‘nose' (or ‘snout' according to my Oxford Spanish dictionary). Sometimes the foreign words are so much better.