San Diego Holidays, Sightseeing Attractions & Things to Do

Introduction

Overlooking downtown and the Pacific Ocean, 1,200-acre Balboa Park is the cultural heart of San Diego. Ranked as one of the world's best parks by the Project for Public Spaces in 2004, it's the place where you can find most of the city's museums and its world-famous zoo. Most first-time visitors see only these attractions, but Balboa Park is really a series of botanical gardens. Thanks to the "Mother of Balboa Park," Kate Sessions, who first suggested hiring a landscape architect in 1889, gardens both cultivated and wild are an integral part of the park.

Downtown is San Diego's Lazarus. Written off as moribund by the 1970s, when few people willingly stayed in the area after dark, downtown is now one of the city's prime draws. The turnaround began in the late 1970s with the revitalization of the Gaslamp Quarter Historic District and massive redevelopment that gave rise to the Horton Plaza shopping center and the San Diego Convention Center, as well as to elegant hotels, upscale condominium complexes, and swank, trendy restaurants and cafés. Now people linger downtown well into the night -- and also wake up there the next morning.

The populated outcroppings that jut into the bay just west of downtown and the airport demonstrate the potential of human collaboration with nature. Point Loma, Mother Nature's contribution to San Diego's attractions, has always protected the center city from the Pacific's tides and waves. It's shared by military installations, funky motels and fast-food shacks, stately family homes, huge estates, and private marinas packed with sailboats and yachts. Newer to the scene, Harbor and Shelter islands are landfill. Created out of sand dredged from the San Diego Bay in the second half of the past century, they've become tourist hubs, their high-rise hotels, seafood restaurants, and boat-rental centers looking as solid as those anywhere else in the city.

Mission Bay Park is San Diego's monument to sports and fitness. This 4,600-acre aquatic park has 27 mi of shoreline including 19 of sandy beach. Admission is free. All you need for a perfect day is a bathing suit, shorts, and the right selection of playthings.

San Diego's Spanish and Mexican roots are most evident in Old Town, the area north of downtown at Juan Street, near the intersection of Interstates 5 and 8, that was the first European settlement in Southern California. Old Town San Diego's first houses, of sun-dried adobe bricks arranged around a central plaza, began to appear in the 1820s; by the 1850s, after the discovery of gold drew prospectors to California from around the globe, they began to be replaced with wood-frame structures. In the 1860s, however, the advent of Alonzo Horton's New Town to the southeast stole thunder from Old Town, which began to wither. Efforts to preserve it began early in the 20th century, and when it became a state historic park in 1968, the process of restoration gained momentum.

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