The inlet that shelters Zeballos was named for Lieutenant Ciriaco Ceballos, a crew member aboard one of the ships in Alessandro Malaspina's expedition, which charted the Pacific coast between 1789 and 1794. For more than a century after the Spanish departed, the location remained obscure, known mainly to the Ehattesaht Chinehkint First Nation, on whose traditional territory the village sits. That changed in the 1930s when gold was discovered in the surrounding mountains. A mining camp sprang up on the river delta, and the name Zeballos, an anglicized version of Ceballos, stuck. The post office made it official in 1946, and the village was incorporated as a municipality in 1952, long after the rush that created it had already faded.

At the peak of mining activity, Zeballos may have held over 5,000 residents. The town's deep-sea port, surrounded by rugged mountains and old-growth forest, hummed with the business of extracting and shipping gold. Then World War II pulled workers into the Canadian Army, and the mines began losing their labor force. After the war, operators tried to restart production, but the fixed gold price of $35.00 per ounce made the economics impossible. Within twenty years of the war's end, every mine had closed for good. Logging stepped in during the 1950s, and an iron mine opened in 1964, but that operation shut down after just five years. Zeballos had become a town accustomed to reinvention, each new industry arriving with optimism and departing with a quieter finality than the last.

On March 27, 1964, the same year the iron mine opened, the Good Friday earthquake struck Alaska. The magnitude 9.2 quake, one of the most powerful ever recorded, sent a tsunami racing down the Pacific coast. When the wave reached Zeballos Inlet, the narrow channel amplified its force. Charles Ford, a young seaplane pilot living in the village, witnessed the destruction firsthand. The tsunami damaged the waterfront and reminded residents of how exposed this small community was to forces far beyond its control. Rebuilding was modest and practical, the kind of quiet recovery that happens in places where fewer than 250 people share the work.

Zeballos sits on the Zeballos River delta at the end of Zeballos Inlet, within reach of both Nootka Sound to the south and Kyuquot Sound to the north. This position has made it a natural jump-off point for anglers heading to some of Vancouver Island's most productive fishing waters. Ecotourism, commercial fishing, and oyster farming have joined the timber industry as economic pillars, though none has restored the population to anything close to its gold-rush peak. Fair Harbour lies 35 kilometers away by unpaved road, and Brooks Peninsula Provincial Park is accessible from the area. In autumn, the Zeballos River puts on the display that no brochure can fully capture: black bears wading in the shallows, bald eagles perched in the spruce overhead, and thousands of salmon pushing upstream through water so clear you can count the stones on the riverbed.