Explore San Diego

Petco Park is the baseball park of the San Diego Padres in the East Village of Downtown San Diego, opened in 2004. It holds about 40,000 spectators and incorporates the 1909 brick building of the Western Metal Supply Company in its left-field corner. Visitors come for games, concerts and guided tours of the ballpark.

The USS Midway Museum is the aircraft carrier USS Midway, moored at Navy Pier on the San Diego waterfront since 2004. Commissioned in 1945, the ship served for 47 years, the longest of any US aircraft carrier in the 20th century, ending with the Gulf War. Visitors explore the flight deck, hangar deck, bridge and crew quarters and around 30 restored aircraft.

The Maritime Museum of San Diego, founded in 1948, keeps a fleet of historic ships on the North Embarcadero. Visitors board the Star of India of 1863, the oldest ship still sailing regularly, the steam ferry Berkeley of 1898, the steam yacht Medea, a Soviet B-39 submarine and the replica galleon San Salvador.

The San Diego Air & Space Museum occupies the round Ford Building, built for the 1935 exposition in Balboa Park. Its galleries trace flight from balloons and the Wright brothers to the space age, with original aircraft, a replica of Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis built in San Diego and the Apollo 9 command module, and an A-12 spy plane stands outside.

The San Diego Automotive Museum on Pan American Plaza in Balboa Park opened in 1988 in a building from the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition. It shows classic and historic cars and motorcycles in changing exhibitions, from early automobiles to racing and custom cars, along with a library and archive on motoring history.

The Museum of Us is an anthropology museum in the California Building of Balboa Park, whose tiled dome and 60-metre California Tower were built for the 1915 exposition. Founded that year as the San Diego Museum of Man and renamed in 2020, it shows exhibitions on human cultures, from ancient Egypt and the Maya to Kumeyaay heritage.

The San Diego Museum of Art opened in 1926 in Balboa Park, in a building by William Templeton Johnson whose Spanish Plateresque façade is modelled on the University of Salamanca. Its collection is known for Spanish old masters such as El Greco, Zurbarán and Goya, and also covers South Asian painting, Italian Renaissance and American art.

The Timken Museum of Art on the Plaza de Panama in Balboa Park opened in 1965 to show the collection of the Putnam Foundation. Its low modernist building, the only one on the plaza not in Spanish style, holds European old master paintings, including a Rembrandt, as well as American paintings and a group of Russian icons.

The Fleet Science Center in Balboa Park opened in 1973 with the world's first IMAX dome theatre, named after the aviation pioneer Reuben H. Fleet. Besides films in the dome, it has hands-on science exhibitions on topics such as light, sound, electricity and the human body, aimed largely at children and families, and planetarium shows.

The San Diego Natural History Museum, known as The Nat, was founded in 1874 and has occupied its Balboa Park building on the Plaza de Balboa since 1933. Its exhibitions cover the plants, animals, fossils and minerals of Southern California and Baja California, among them dinosaur and mammoth fossils, and it has a giant-screen theatre.

Balboa Park is a cultural park of about 490 hectares north-east of Downtown San Diego. Its Spanish Colonial Revival buildings along El Prado were built for the Panama–California Exposition of 1915 and the exposition of 1935, and today it holds 17 museums, theatres, gardens such as the Botanical Building with its lily pond, and the San Diego Zoo.

The San Diego Zoo in Balboa Park was founded in 1916 by the physician Harry Wegeforth and covers about 40 hectares of canyons and mesas. It keeps some 12,000 animals of more than 650 species in open, moated habitats grouped by region, and visitors can cross the grounds on the Skyfari aerial tram or a guided bus tour.

The San Diego–Coronado Bridge crosses San Diego Bay between Barrio Logan and the city of Coronado in a long curve 3.4 kilometres in length. Opened in 1969, its blue steel girders rise to about 61 metres above the water so that Navy ships can pass beneath. It carries cars only and is seen from the waterfront, Coronado's Ferry Landing and Chicano Park.

The Whaley House in Old Town San Diego is a two-storey Greek Revival brick house built in 1857 by the merchant Thomas Whaley, one of the oldest brick buildings in Southern California. Besides being the family home, it housed a general store, the county courthouse and a theatre, and it is now a museum furnished in the style of the 1850s to 1880s.

Old Town San Diego State Historic Park preserves the core of the town from the Mexican and early American periods, between about 1821 and 1872, below the hill where the Spanish presidio stood. Around a central plaza stand restored and reconstructed adobe and wooden buildings, such as the Casa de Estudillo of 1827, with small museums, shops and restaurants.

SeaWorld San Diego is a marine theme park on Mission Bay, opened in 1964 as the first SeaWorld. It combines animal habitats and aquariums, with penguins, dolphins, sea lions, sharks and orcas, with roller coasters such as Manta, Electric Eel and Emperor, and the Bayside Skyride cable car that crosses part of the bay.

Cabrillo National Monument on the tip of the Point Loma peninsula marks the landing of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo in San Diego Bay in 1542, the first European expedition to the west coast of what is now the United States. The National Park Service site includes the Old Point Loma Lighthouse of 1855, tide pools, coastal trails and views over the bay and the city.

Mission San Diego de Alcalá was founded in 1769 by the Franciscan friar Junípero Serra as the first of the 21 Spanish missions in California, and moved to this site in Mission Valley in 1774. The whitewashed church with its five-bell campanario dates in its present form from 1813; the grounds hold a small museum and gardens, and it is an active parish.

Belmont Park is a seaside amusement park on Mission Beach in San Diego, opened in 1925 by the businessman John D. Spreckels. Its centrepiece is the Giant Dipper, a wooden roller coaster from the same year and a National Historic Landmark; beside it are The Plunge indoor pool, smaller rides, arcades and restaurants by the boardwalk.