On Hwy-49, 5 miles East of Grass Valley. Drunken brawling and public hangings were the order of the day in many gold rush towns, but Nevada City, with its white-painted two-story Victorian mansions, steepled churches and picket fences, was a cut above the rest. Being the seat of Nevada County, whose mines accounted for half the total gold yielded in California, Nevada City became one of the Gold Country’s most affluent settlements.

On Nevada City’s narrow tree-lined streets are scores of historic buildings. Take a walk beneath the fake gas-lamps of Broad Street and you’ll discover the National Hotel (http://www.thenationalhotel.com), no. 211, serving travellers since 1856 and claiming to be the West’s oldest hostelry; also the Old Nevada Theatre (http://www.nevadatheatre.com), also thought to be the oldest of its kind in the West, which first raised its curtain in 1865 and saw author Mark Twain give his first public lecture. Close by, the Firehouse Museum (https://www.nevadacountyhistory.org/firehouse-no.-1-museum2.html), 214 Main Street, assembles an amusing collection of ageing articles inside an 1861 fire station, and the Miners Foundry and Cultural Center (http://minersfoundry.org), 325 Spring Street, has turned the workshops that once produced mining tools into an arts and crafts showplace.

The informative Chamber of Commerce, 132 Main Street, issues free walking maps of all the town’s notable buildings. There is something here which pre-dates by far the discovery of gold, however. To find it, walk for a few hundred yards east along Broad Street, to where the Indian Medicine Rock has stood since prehistoric times when it was revered by the Maidu people: they believed that whatever ailed them would be cured if they lay on the rock soaking up the rays of the sun.