In the BtVS episode "Empty Places," Spike and Andrew head off to a monastery in Gilroy. For the first time, I think, we have a real place mentioned in such a context as to help locate Sunnydale quite well on the map. It's somewhere between Gilroy and LA, and close enough to Gilroy that Spike can be sure of getting there, taking care of business, and returning in a single night, on his motorcycle, even when starting a couple of hours after dark. [1] However, it's far enough away that Giles would fly, not drive, to Oakland (see BtVS 3x1, "Anne"). So I'd probably place it a bit north of Santa Barbara, more around the San Luis Obispo area. Blatantly none of this, of course, works with the desert, but at least the wooded areas make sense, then. Such a location would work well with the presence of the vineyard, too; the Central Coast is chock full of vineyards, from around Santa Barbara up through Monterey, which is only just southwest of Gilroy.

There are, however, a few problems with this theory. First of all, in "Welcome to the Hellmouth" Buffy states that Sunnydale is "two hours on the freeway from Neiman Marcus." It takes more like three hours to get from Beverly Hills to San Luis. We know that Sunnydale is by the ocean ("Go Fish," as well as any episode in which the docks feature), so Buffy can't be talking about it taking two hours on the 5; she has to mean the 101, and Santa Barbara, or perhaps the quaint little Danish town of Solvang, is what's just about 2 hours north of LA on the 101. But she could be rounding off numbers a bit, and I'd say that therefore Sunnydale is at least as far north as Santa Maria, if not a bit further. (It takes 3 hours to get from Santa Maria to Gilroy, so 6 hours round-trip, and assuming that Spike and Andrew left Sunnydale at 9pm or so, and that sunrise is around 6am, that gives them about 2 solid hours to take care of business at the monastery, plus some leeway.)

What I wish that I could say with absolute certainty, however, is that Sunnydale is not south of LA, as has been presumed on many an occasion by fans; and that it's assuredly further north than Santa Barbara. Sadly, we encounter more problems here. The season 1 episode "Nightmares" contains two insanely conflicting bits of information. 1) Both Buffy and Willow refer to Buffy's dad coming "down" from L.A. to visit. This would, contrary to what I have determined, obviously put Sunnydale south of LA on the map. 2) On the other hand, Wendell says he had the best spider collection in the tri-county area. There are a few places sometimes referred to as the tri-county area; we have, for example, Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito counties, and we have Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo counties, and we have San Joaquin, Stanislaus, and Merced counties.... Not doing well for placement here. We've also got the nicely overlapping region of San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Monterey counties. On the other hand, all of these areas are in central California. So... I think I'll discount the "down" bit, 'cause really, it just doesn't make sense. At all. I figure David Greenwalt was just tripping.

Another way to discount the "down" and to rule out Sunnydale being below LA is to refer once more to the Neiman Marcus reference in "Welcome to the Hellmouth." There is, according to www.neimanmarcus.com, a store in LA, and another in San Diego. San Diego is only just above Mexico, so there's no way Sunnydale could be south of San Diego. And anywhere in between the two cities, there's not a full two hour drive on either side. There's also a store in Newport Beach, which is vaguely between San Diego and L.A. So, yeah. David Greenwalt must have been tripping.

I'd also like to point again at the vineyard reference. That really does narrow it down to the central coast, since it's obviously not in the Napa area; if it were, Giles wouldn't have flown to Oakland. What's more, is that the vineyard wasn't randomly concocted during season 7 to use for Caleb's hideout. As far back as season 4, we know that Sunnydale is near vineyards. When Riley is trying to explain to Buffy in "Something Blue" why he likes driving for fun, he says, "I'm taking you. Some night when it's warm. Up past the vineyards — it's going to change everything for you." So Sunnydale has never been too far from a vineyarded area, and that stretch of the 101 from Santa Barbara northwards has been fairly well planted since around 1995.

A more tenuous method of placing Sunnydale somewhere in the stretch between Oxnard and, say, around Bradley, to the north of Paso Robles, is by looking at the area code. Now, the area code given for Sunnydale is 803, which is actually in South Carolina. But the area code in the region I have mentioned is 805. I think that Joss and his writers are trying to summon that area code to mind by using 803; with the new area code rules, which were coming into place just around the time that Buffy aired, they could easily have picked an area code that didn't already exist. Instead, they chose one that did exist, under the old system, but somewhere else; perhaps for a reason. And being not too far away from Oxnard also makes Xander's failed road trip between seasons 3 and 4 all the more amusing.

Lastly, there is one concrete reference to an approximate location for Sunnydale, at least in relation to Los Angeles. In the last episode of season 4 of Angel, "Home," Lilah refers to Sunnydale as being "up the coast." That's not some strange turn of phrase that can actually mean south — "up the coast" means to the north, no two ways about it.

Now, if someone would just obligingly give us a zip code....[2]

Notes
[1] In the end, of course, Spike and Andrew spend the night at the monastery, but that cannot be foreseen when they leave. We must assume that a single-night round-trip is possible. And they do get back reasonably early the next night.

[2] A. Smithee wrote me an e-mail to point out that in episode 6.15 of Buffy, there is a letter addressed to Buffy with the zipcode 95037. That's actually Morgan Hill, just south of San Jose on the 101, which is too close to Oakland for Giles to have flown there, but it's still nice to have a somewhat northern address.