The desert's mid-century modern capital — a Coachella Valley oasis where Hollywood built a town of butterfly roofs and the world's largest rotating tram climbs two miles into the mountains. Palm Springs sits in a bowl of sun at the foot of Mount San Jacinto, on the floor of the Coachella Valley. The Agua Caliente Cahuilla built their lives around its hot mineral springs and palm-canyon oases for thousands of years; by the 1950s it had become a sun-drenched modernist playground of clean lines and kidney-shaped pools. Three hundred and fifty days of sun, a mountain that leaps straight off the desert floor, and a whole town of desert-modern design — this page tells the story.
Palm Springs keeps two kinds of cool. There is the design — the butterfly roofs and glass walls of the mid-century town, celebrated every Modernism Week. And there is the literal kind: the rotating tram that lifts you nearly six thousand feet off the valley floor into the pines of Mount San Jacinto, where it can be forty degrees cooler than the desert below. Between them sits the oasis itself — the Cahuilla hot springs, the fan-palm canyons, and the long mountain wall that makes the whole valley feel like a room.
Why People Visit Palm Springs California
People come to Palm Springs for the sun, the mid-century modern design, and the rare pairing of desert and mountain — palm oases on the valley floor, snow-dusted pines a tram ride above. It is bright, stylish, and walkable: the desert's design capital at the foot of Mount San Jacinto.
