Explore San Diego

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.

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.

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.