San Diego's Most Iconic Landmarks

Balboa Park began in 1868, when San Diego's leaders reserved a large tract of scrubby mesa just north of downtown as a city park.

For decades it stayed mostly wild, until the city chose it to host the Panama-California Exposition of 1915 to 1916, held to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal.

The fair's planners filled the mesa with ornate Spanish Colonial Revival buildings, arcades and towers, and the park took the name of the Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa.

Many of those exposition buildings survived and became the homes of museums, theaters and gardens.

The California Tower, with its tiled dome, rises over El Prado, the park's main promenade, while the Botanical Building, a large lath structure beside a long lily pond, is one of the most photographed spots in the city.

A second fair in 1935 and 1936 added more buildings, including the half-timbered cottages of the House of Pacific Relations.

Today Balboa Park is the cultural heart of San Diego.

It holds a cluster of museums covering art, natural history, science, air and space and photography, the Old Globe theater, the Spreckels Organ Pavilion with its giant outdoor pipe organ, the Japanese Friendship Garden and the San Diego Zoo.

It is also simply a beloved city park, where families picnic on the lawns and runners use the trails in the canyons.

USS Midway was commissioned in September 1945, just after the end of the Second World War, and served the United States Navy for 47 years, making it the longest-serving American aircraft carrier of the 20th century.

Over that career it sailed through the Cold War, took part in operations during the Vietnam War, including the evacuation of Saigon in 1975, and served in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

The ship was decommissioned in San Diego in 1992 and, after years of effort by a local nonprofit, was moored at Navy Pier on the downtown waterfront and opened as a museum in 2004.

It has since become one of the most visited attractions in the city, and it fits San Diego naturally, since the bay has been home to a major Navy presence for more than a century.

Visitors move through the hangar deck, crew quarters, galley, engine room and the island superstructure that rises above the flight deck. Up top, a line of restored aircraft and helicopters stretches across the deck, with the skyline on one side and the bay on the other.

Many docents are veterans, and their stories about life at sea give the visit much of its character.

The Gaslamp Quarter grew out of New Town, the settlement that the developer Alonzo Horton laid out near the bay after buying a large tract of land in 1867.

Horton's bet that the city's future lay on the waterfront rather than in Old Town paid off, and during the boom of the 1880s the area filled with commercial buildings in brick and stone, many of them in elaborate Victorian styles.

The district also had a rough side. Part of it, known as the Stingaree, was famous for saloons, gambling halls and brothels, and the lawman Wyatt Earp ran several gambling establishments here during the boom years.

As downtown declined in the 20th century, many buildings fell into disrepair, and some were threatened with demolition before preservationists and city planners began reviving the area in the 1970s and 1980s.

Today the Gaslamp Quarter is a protected historic district of sixteen or so blocks along Fifth Avenue and the streets around it.

Its restored facades house restaurants, bars, rooftop lounges and shops, and the gas-style street lamps that give it its name glow along the sidewalks at night. It sits next to Petco Park and the Convention Center, so it is busiest on game nights and during large events.

Old Town grew up in the 1820s below Presidio Hill, the site of the Spanish fort and mission founded in 1769.

As the Mexican period began, soldiers and their families moved down from the hill and built homes around a central plaza, and the settlement became the heart of San Diego.

After California became part of the United States, Old Town remained the center of the city until the new waterfront district of New Town drew business away in the 1870s.

The state historic park preserves and recreates the town as it looked between the 1820s and 1870s. Its most important building is the Casa de Estudillo, a large adobe home built around a courtyard for a prominent Californio family.

Other restored and reconstructed buildings include an early newspaper office, a blacksmith shop, a stable full of old wagons and a one-room schoolhouse, many of them small museums with period furnishings.

The park is also a living place. Restaurants serve Mexican food around the plaza, shops sell crafts and candy, and staff and volunteers demonstrate historic skills on some days.

Just outside the park, the Whaley House, built in 1857 and often described as one of the most haunted houses in America, draws its own steady stream of visitors.

In September 1542 Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, sailing for Spain, entered San Diego Bay, the first European expedition to reach the West Coast of what is now the United States.

Cabrillo National Monument, created in 1913 by a proclamation of President Woodrow Wilson, commemorates that voyage from the southern tip of the Point Loma peninsula, high above the entrance to the bay.

The park's most famous structure is the Old Point Loma Lighthouse, which began operating in 1855. It sat so high on the headland that fog and low clouds often hid its light, and it was replaced in 1891 by a new lighthouse closer to the water.

Restored and furnished as a 19th-century keeper's home, the old lighthouse is now a small museum. A statue of Cabrillo looks out over the bay from an overlook near the visitor center.

The monument is also a nature reserve. From the overlooks you can see downtown, Coronado, the Navy ships in the bay and, on clear days, the mountains of Mexico.

On the western side of the point, the rocky shore exposes tide pools full of anemones, crabs and sea stars at low tide, and in winter visitors watch for migrating gray whales offshore.

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, the scientist who developed the first successful polio vaccine.

Salk wanted a research center that would inspire creativity and collaboration, and he hired the architect Louis Kahn to design it on the coastal mesa of La Jolla, high above the Pacific.

Kahn's design, completed in the 1960s, is now considered one of the masterpieces of 20th-century architecture. Two mirror-image laboratory buildings in raw concrete and teak face each other across a broad travertine courtyard.

A thin channel of water runs down the center of the plaza toward the ocean, drawing the eye to the horizon. The Mexican architect Luis Barragán advised Kahn to leave the courtyard bare, without trees or gardens, calling it a facade to the sky.

The institute remains a leading center for research in biology, neuroscience and genetics, and its scientists have included several Nobel laureates.

For visitors, the attraction is the architecture itself and the sense of calm it creates: the empty plaza, the precise concrete, the light changing across the stone and the ocean filling the view at the far end.