European San Diego dates to the summer of 1769, when Spanish expeditions established the Presidio of San Diego and Mission San Diego de Alcalá — the first of the twenty-one California missions and the first European settlement on the West Coast of the present-day United States. It is the event that earned the city its enduring nickname, the 'Birthplace of California.' The mission era is also a difficult history: in 1775 the Kumeyaay rose against the mission in an act of resistance against a system imposed on their land and their lives. San Diego holds both truths at once — the founding that opened California to the wider world, and the people whose home it already was.
The early twentieth century gave the city its grandest set piece. For the Panama-California Exposition of 1915–16 — staged to mark San Diego as the first U.S. port of call for ships coming north through the new Panama Canal — architect Bertram Goodhue filled Balboa Park with a Spanish Colonial Revival fantasia of towers, arches, and tiled domes. The California Tower, the Cabrillo Bridge, and the Botanical Building still stand, and the park grew into the largest urban cultural park in the country. Add the Victorian turrets of the 1888 Hotel del Coronado across the bay and the white adobe of the old mission, and San Diego's look comes into focus: mission, Victorian seaside, and Spanish-colonial arch, all under the same bright sky.
Why People Visit San Diego
San Diego rewards visitors with a rare mix: deep early-California history, a working Navy harbor, world-class parks and museums, and miles of Pacific coast, all under a famously mild sky. People come for Balboa Park and the bay, for the beaches and the sunsets off Point Loma, and for the layered story of the city where California began. It is historic, easygoing, and unmistakably Californian.
