Michael Jackson purchased the Sycamore Valley Ranch in Los Olivos, California, in March 1988 for roughly 19.5 million dollars. The property was 2,700 acres of rolling oak-covered hills in Santa Barbara County, about a two-hour drive northwest of Los Angeles. Michael renamed it Neverland Ranch after the fictional island in J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan.
Over the next several years he developed the property into something between a private home and a small theme park. The full installation included a working narrow-gauge railroad with two trains, a Ferris wheel, a carousel, bumper cars, a roller coaster, two pirate-themed kiddie rides, a private zoo with elephants, giraffes, orangutans, and a chimpanzee named Bubbles, and a 50-seat private cinema with full IMAX-grade projection.
Michael said in multiple interviews that Neverland was an attempt to rebuild the childhood he had lost to constant touring with the Jackson 5 starting at age 6. He regularly invited busloads of children from terminal-illness charities and inner-city schools to spend the day on the property at no charge. By his estimate, by the early 2000s, more than 200,000 children had visited Neverland as his guests.
The estate also functioned as Michael's primary recording studio for parts of HIStory and most of Invincible. He had a state-of-the-art live room built into a converted ranch building, with isolation booths for vocals and drums. Engineers who worked there described it as one of the most acoustically pleasant rooms in California — quiet, dry, and surrounded by horses.
After 2005, Michael never lived at Neverland again. The property was sold to a private investor in 2008. In December 2020, it was acquired by billionaire Ron Burkle. Most of the rides have been dismantled. The zoo is closed. The main house and grounds remain, largely preserved, on the same 2,700 acres of oak hills that Michael fell in love with in 1988.