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
- Ride the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway up Chino Canyon to the cooler pine forests of Mount San Jacinto State Park.
- Hike the Indian Canyons, the Cahuilla fan-palm oases with stream-fed trails.
- Tour the mid-century modern neighborhoods — and time a visit for Modernism Week in February.
- Stroll Palm Canyon Drive downtown for galleries, design shops, and classic facades.
- Wander Moorten Botanical Garden and the Palm Springs Art Museum.
- Detour west to the roadside Cabazon Dinosaurs (in Cabazon, about 20 minutes away) or out to Joshua Tree National Park.
