Explore San Jose

The Tech Interactive is a science and technology centre in downtown San Jose, housed since 1998 in an orange building with a blue dome designed by the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta. Visitors try hands-on exhibits, labs and design challenges on subjects such as engineering, biology and robotics, and the dome holds an IMAX theatre.

The San Jose Museum of Art is a museum of modern and contemporary art in downtown San Jose, founded in 1969, with a collection centred on West Coast artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. It occupies the city's former main post office, a sandstone Romanesque Revival building of 1892, together with a wing added in 1991.

The Cathedral Basilica of St. Joseph stands on Plaza de César Chávez in downtown San Jose. The present church, the fifth on the site since 1803, was dedicated in 1877; its portico followed in 1884 and its dome in 1885. It became the cathedral of the Diocese of San Jose in 1985 and keeps an Odell pipe organ built in 1886.

The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose is a museum of ancient Egypt founded by the Rosicrucian order AMORC, which first showed its collection in 1928 and moved it in 1966 into an Egyptian-style building in Rosicrucian Park. It displays mummies, statues and everyday objects and has a walk-in replica of a rock-cut tomb.

The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose is the Victorian mansion of Sarah Winchester, widow of the rifle maker William Wirt Winchester, who kept extending it from 1886 until her death in 1922, when it had about 160 rooms. Guided tours lead through the house, past doors that open onto nothing and staircases that end abruptly.

Mission Santa Clara de Asís in Santa Clara, north-west of San Jose, was founded by Franciscans in 1777 as the eighth Spanish mission in California and the first named after a woman, Saint Clare of Assisi. The present church, rebuilt after a fire in 1926 and consecrated in 1929, stands on the campus of Santa Clara University and serves as its chapel.