At the southern tip of the Point Loma peninsula, a large stone statue of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo gazes out toward the Pacific Ocean. This monument commemorates the landing of the Portuguese explorer here on September twenty-eighth, fifteen…
History of San Diego
This tour traces San Diego's evolution from the first European landing in 1542 through the colonial, Mexican, and early American eras up to its 20th-century milestones.
Take this tour in street view →Listen in the Mira app
1. Cabrillo National Monument
2. Liberty Station
Liberty Station consists of long rows of uniform, white-walled buildings designed in the Spanish Colonial Revival style. These structures were built starting in nineteen twenty-one as the Naval Training Center, a facility that housed…
3. Presidio de San Diego
The Serra Cross, a tall white marker standing atop the hill, identifies the site of the first permanent European settlement on the Pacific Coast. Known as the Presidio of San Diego, this military garrison and mission complex was…
4. Old Town San Diego State Historic Park
Old Town San Diego State Historic Park serves as a living window into the mid-nineteenth century, a period when this site transitioned from a Mexican pueblo to an American settlement. Established in nineteen sixty-eight, the park protects…
5. Whaley House Museum
The Whaley House in Old Town San Diego is recognizable as the city's first two-story brick structure, built in the Greek Revival style. Thomas Whaley, an entrepreneur who arrived during the Gold Rush, designed the house and fired its…
6. Balboa Park
Balboa Park is defined by its ornate, highly decorative Spanish Colonial Revival buildings that line the central promenade known as El Prado. This twelve-hundred-acre urban cultural park began in eighteen sixty-eight as a scrub-covered…
7. Gaslamp Quarter
The Gaslamp Quarter is defined by the rows of nineteenth-century Victorian-era buildings that line its sixteen blocks of downtown San Diego. While the district today is known for its concentration of restaurants and nightlife, it began in…
8. Santa Fe Depot
The Santa Fe Depot is identifiable by its twin towers topped with tiled domes and the zigzag pattern of its glazed exterior tiles. Built for the nineteen fifteen Panama-California Exposition, the station was intended to showcase San Diego…
9. Hotel del Coronado
The Hotel del Coronado is defined by its sweeping silhouette and iconic red-roofed turrets, a vast structure of white wood that rises against the Pacific coastline. Opened in eighteen eighty-eight, this resort was designed by architects…