Prince Harry And Meghan Markle Live Minutes Away From This Smelly Facility

It took Prince Harry and Meghan Markle a little while to get settled stateside after defecting from the royal family in early 2020, with the beloved couple enjoying sojourns up north in Canada, as well as being house guests of Tyler Perry in his Los Angeles mansion for a short while too. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex eventually moved to fashionable Montecito, in California, joining the exclusive community in July 2020 when they purchased a stunning, nine-bedroom mansion in the same neighborhood as Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres. As Marie Claire UK notes, Meghan and Harry were ready to put down roots and the starry Santa Barbara community proved to be the ideal spot for them.

According to an upcoming epilogue to unauthorized tell-all biography, "Finding Freedom," by royal experts Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, "A number of the couple's friends, including Oprah, had recommended Santa Barbara County as the perfect place to raise a family." The double-gated Montecito area also provides the requisite security for their growing family but isn't cut off from civilization either. This latest account comes from alleged "close friends" of the couple, but the Sussexes were not interviewed personally. Although Meghan and Harry's 7.4-acre, 18,671-square-foot property is the picture of luxury, and has proven the ideal family home, its close proximity to somewhere else is unfortunate.

You can choose your home but not your neighbors and, in the case of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, they're probably really wishing they could. According to The Mirror, the Sussexes' stunning Montecito mansion is located mere miles away from a huge cannabis factory. Just a 10-minute drive from their expansive compound, where Meghan and Harry live alongside young children Archie, two, and Lilibet, two months, the factory reportedly releases a rancid stench across the land thanks to its 20 greenhouses legally growing marijuana. Several neighbors have complained about the stink, leading the company responsible to reassure everybody they are installing new "odor control systems." One local, Gregory Gandrud, even complained of having to pull over while driving along the freeway, because the smell was so overwhelming and made him "completely lose my train of thought." 

Gandrud reasoned the purported new measures are "good news for us, and Harry and Meghan," admitting, "Lots of people here are suffering." Fellow Montecito denizen Richard Mineards opined, "Growing cannabis near here became legal in 2016 and lots of growers jumped on the bandwagon." The Sussexes' massive mansion set them back a whopping $14.7 million and boasts a library, home cinema, and spa among many other notable amenities. Although Meghan and Harry have made a home there, this isn't the first time the surrounding area has made headlines, as human remains were discovered even closer to their property than the cannabis factory just a couple months ago.