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Venice Beach is the beach and oceanfront boardwalk of Venice, a Los Angeles neighbourhood founded in 1905 by Abbot Kinney with canals modelled on Venice in Italy. The paved Ocean Front Walk is lined with shops, food stands and street performers, and along the sand are the Muscle Beach outdoor gym, a skate park and basketball courts.

The Third Street Promenade is a pedestrian street of three blocks in Downtown Santa Monica, between Wilshire Boulevard and Broadway, two blocks from the beach. Closed to cars in 1965 and redesigned in 1989, it is lined with shops, cinemas and restaurants, has fountains with topiary dinosaurs and is a regular spot for street performers.

The Santa Monica Pier reaches about 490 metres into the Pacific at the foot of Colorado Avenue. Built in 1909, it carries the Looff Hippodrome of 1916 with its carousel, the small Pacific Park amusement park with a solar-powered Ferris wheel, an aquarium run by Heal the Bay, restaurants and anglers' rails, and marks the western end of Route 66.

The Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades is the J. Paul Getty Museum's site for the art of ancient Greece, Rome and Etruria. Opened in 1974 and modelled on the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, it holds about 44,000 antiquities in galleries around peristyle gardens with a long reflecting pool, above the Pacific Coast Highway.

Gilroy Gardens is a horticulture-themed family amusement park in Gilroy, about 50 km south of San Jose, opened by Michael Bonfante in 2001 as Bonfante Gardens and now run by a non-profit. Gardens and thousands of trees surround its rides, and it shows the Circus Trees, trees grafted and shaped into unusual forms by Axel Erlandson.

Six Flags Discovery Kingdom is an amusement and animal park in Vallejo, at the northern end of San Francisco Bay. It opened here in 1986 as Marine World Africa USA and has been part of the Six Flags chain since 1999. Roller coasters such as Medusa and The Joker share the grounds with dolphin, sea lion, tiger and giraffe exhibits.

Happy Hollow Park & Zoo is a combined zoo and children's amusement park in Kelley Park, San Jose, first opened in 1961. It covers 16 acres (6.5 ha) and reopened in 2010 after a two-year rebuild. Visitors see animals such as lemurs, a jaguar and red pandas, and ride a carousel, a family roller coaster and other small rides.

The Japanese Friendship Garden is a walled garden of about six acres in Kelley Park, San Jose, dedicated in 1965. It is modelled on the Kōraku-en garden in Okayama, one of San Jose's sister cities. Paths lead around three ponds at different levels, linked by streams and stocked with koi first sent from Okayama in 1966.

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 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 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 San Jose Municipal Rose Garden, founded in 1927, lies in the Rose Garden district west of downtown San Jose. It is planted only with roses: more than 3,500 shrubs of 189 varieties grow in formal beds set around lawns and a central fountain, with tall conifers along its edges.

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.

Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, north-west of San Jose, has been the home of the NFL's San Francisco 49ers since it opened in 2014. The open-air stadium hosted Super Bowl 50 in 2016, Super Bowl LX in 2026 and matches of the 2026 FIFA World Cup; visitors come for games and concerts and for the 49ers Museum inside the stadium.

California's Great America is an amusement park in Santa Clara, north-west of San Jose, opened by the Marriott Corporation in 1976 and now run by Six Flags. Its themed areas hold more than 40 rides, among them the wooden roller coaster Gold Striker, a Peanuts-themed children's area and the South Bay Shores water park.

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.

The Computer History Museum is in Mountain View, about 18 km northwest of downtown San Jose, in a former Silicon Graphics office building it opened in 2002. Its main exhibition, Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing, traces computing across 20 galleries from the abacus to the internet, with machines such as a Cray-1 supercomputer.

The USS Hornet Sea, Air & Space Museum occupies the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, moored at the former Naval Air Station Alameda, in Alameda across the bay from San Francisco. Commissioned in 1943, the ship fought in the Pacific in the Second World War and in 1969 recovered the Apollo 11 and 12 crews; visitors tour its decks, aircraft and Apollo exhibits.

The San Francisco Ferry Building is a ferry terminal on the Embarcadero at the foot of Market Street, designed by A. Page Brown and completed in 1898, with a 245-foot clock tower. After a restoration that ended in 2003, its 660-foot skylit nave holds a food hall with shops and restaurants, and ferries still leave from the piers behind it.