Today San Diego trades on its climate as much as its history — 'America's Finest City,' roughly seventy degrees the year round, with the Pacific at the doorstep. Visitors and locals split their days between Balboa Park's museums and gardens, the coves and cliffs of La Jolla, the lighthouse and tide pools of Point Loma, and the long beaches of Coronado, Mission Beach, and Ocean Beach. The bay glitters, the sun drops behind Point Loma, and the same harbor that started the whole story keeps right on working into the evening.
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.
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.
