San Diego Audio Tour

Highlights

• 
  Petco Park

  Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres, rises in front of you, widely regarded as one of the most beautiful ballparks in Major League Baseball. The stadium opened in April 2004 after years of political controversy, legal battles, and a public financing debate that dominated local politics through the late 1990s and early 2000s.

• Hotel del Coronado

  Red-tiled roofs and white wooden turrets rise around you, a Victorian fantasy that has welcomed guests since February 19, 1888. The hotel was built in less than a year by a workforce of Chinese laborers and has operated continuously for over 130 years.

• 
  Balboa Park

  1,200 acres of canyons, gardens, and museums open around you, land set aside for the public in 1868, now one of the great urban parks in America. The land was set aside for public use in 1868, when San Diego was still a tiny frontier town, in a visionary act of civic planning.

• 
  USS Midway Museum

  Alongside you sits the USS Midway, the longest-serving American aircraft carrier of the twentieth century and now the most-visited naval ship museum in the world. Commissioned just one week after Japan's surrender in September 1945, the Midway served the US Navy for forty-seven years — through the Cold War, Vietnam, and the Gulf War — before being decommissioned in 1992.

• 
  Old Globe Theatre

  Picture forty-five-minute Shakespeare performances luring fairgoers here in 1935, when this replica of London's Globe rose in Balboa Park. The theater was built in 1935 as a replica of Shakespeare's original Globe Theatre in London, constructed for the California Pacific International Exposition as a venue for abridged forty-five-minute performances of Shakespeare's plays — designed to let fairgoers sample the Bard between exhibits.

All 40 stops

• Old Town San Diego State Historic Park (Old Town)

  Your walk begins on a low hill above San Diego Bay, where California's story starts.

• Presidio Hill (Old Town)

  Picture this hilltop on July 16, 1769, when Father Junípero Serra and Gaspar de Portolá planted Alta California's first European flag.

• Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcalá (Mission Valley)

  Notice the white façade of Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcalá, first of California's twenty-one Spanish missions.

• Junípero Serra Statue / Colonial Legacy Site (Old Town)

  Here you face a place tied to Father Junípero Serra, the Franciscan whose 2015 canonization by Pope Francis reignited fierce debate.

• Gaslamp Quarter (Downtown)

  Sixteen blocks of Victorian storefronts surround you here, once the rowdy Stingaree of the American West's saloons and gambling dens.

• Horton Plaza / Horton Park (Downtown)

  Picture Alonzo Horton, the Connecticut-born speculator whose scrubland purchase became the San Diego you know today.

• USS Midway Museum (Embarcadero)

  Alongside you sits the USS Midway, the longest-serving American aircraft carrier of the twentieth century and now the most-visited naval ship museum in the world.

• Midway Drive / WWII Naval History (Embarcadero)

  You're walking the stretch of harbor that anchored the American war effort in the Pacific from 1941 to 1945.

• Embarcadero Waterfront (Downtown Waterfront)

  Reclaimed tidelands stretch beneath your feet here, shaping San Diego's downtown waterfront promenade since the 1850s.

• Seaport Village (Downtown Waterfront)

  14 acres of reclaimed San Diego Bay tidelands hold the shops and piers in front of you now.

• San Diego Convention Center (Downtown Waterfront)

  Those Teflon-coated sails billowing over the harbor belong to the San Diego Convention Center, which opened in 1989 and reshaped how the city thinks about…

• East Village / Ballpark District (Downtown)

  Twenty years ago warehouses and SRO hotels filled these blocks, until Petco Park reshaped East Village around you.

• Petco Park (East Village)

  Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres, rises in front of you, widely regarded as one of the most beautiful ballparks in Major League…

• Little Italy (Little Italy)

  Your walk enters Little Italy, the neighborhood that grew up in the 1920s around San Diego's Italian tuna fishing fleet and still thrives as one…

• India Street / Little Italy Cultural Hub (Little Italy)

  Bocce courts and fish markets once lined India Street, San Diego's Little Italy restaurant corridor you now walk.

• Balboa Park (Balboa Park)

  1,200 acres of canyons, gardens, and museums open around you, land set aside for the public in 1868, now one of the great urban parks…

• San Diego Natural History Museum (Balboa Park)

  Founded in 1874, when San Diego counted barely 2,300 residents, this natural history museum has grown into the research institution you see today.

• Timken Museum of Art (Balboa Park)

  Critics hated this modernist jewel box when it went up on Balboa Park's Plaza de Panama in 1965, but the Timken Museum of Art holds…

• Old Globe Theatre (Balboa Park)

  Picture forty-five-minute Shakespeare performances luring fairgoers here in 1935, when this replica of London's Globe rose in Balboa Park.

• Reuben H. Fleet Science Center (Balboa Park)

  Since 1973 the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center has drawn families and students to this corner of Balboa Park with hands-on science.

• San Diego Museum of Art (Balboa Park)

  Carved stonework modeled on Spain's University of Salamanca frames the entrance you approach, one of the finest examples of Spanish Plateresque architecture in the United…

• San Diego Zoo (Balboa Park)

  A physician's decision after hearing lions roar in 1916 gave you the San Diego Zoo, now home to over 12,000 animals.

• Canada de las Palmas (Park West) (Balboa Park)

  Chaparral-filled canyons open around you here, where Balboa Park's formal plaza gives way to natural ravines carved by centuries of rain.

• Morley Field / Balboa Park Recreation (Balboa Park)

  Free disc golf since 1975 anchors this corner of Balboa Park, San Diego's favorite outdoor recreation grounds around you.

• North Park Arts District (North Park)

  North Park, where you now walk, arguably best represents San Diego's contemporary urban identity: a walkable, densely built, arts-and-food-focused district that was once a streetcar…

• South Park / Golden Hill (South Park)

  Craftsman bungalows and independent coffee shops line the streets around you here, a pocket neighborhood just southeast of Balboa Park.

• Banker's Hill / Spruce Street Suspension Bridge (Banker's Hill)

  Grand Victorian and Craftsman homes rise around you here, built in the 1890s by bankers drawn to views of Balboa Park and the bay.

• Golden Hill (Golden Hill)

  Speculators platted the streets around you during California's great land boom of 1886 to 1888, one of San Diego's earliest streetcar suburbs.

• Point Loma / Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery (Point Loma)

  Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo rounded this narrow peninsula in September 1542, the first European contact point with Alta California you now walk.

• Cabrillo National Monument (Point Loma)

  Here recorded California history begins, where you look out over the bay Cabrillo entered in 1542.

• Ocean Beach (Ocean Beach)

  San Diegans call this beach community around you OB, a resort town turned stubborn counterculture holdout amid San Diego's gentrification.

• Mission Beach / Belmont Park (Mission Beach)

  Barely half a block wide in places, Mission Beach puts the Pacific Ocean on one side of you and Mission Bay on the other, and…

• Pacific Beach Boardwalk (Pacific Beach)

  Your surroundings pack more bars and restaurants per capita than any other San Diego neighborhood, a surf culture that took hold here in the late…

• La Jolla Cove / La Jolla Village (La Jolla)

  Turquoise water and sandstone cliffs frame the cove you see, protected as an ecological reserve since 1929 and San Diego's most photographed natural feature.

• Birch Aquarium at Scripps (La Jolla)

  Perched on this cliffside campus above the Pacific, the Birch Aquarium at Scripps is the public face of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of…

• Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve (Torrey Pines)

  Rare Torrey pines surround you here, the only wild stand on Earth, in one of the wildest corners of an American metropolitan area.

• Coronado Island (Coronado)

  Locals call this 32-square-mile peninsula you're crossing an island: San Diegans link it to Chula Vista by the Silver Strand and to San Diego by…

• Hotel del Coronado (Coronado)

  Red-tiled roofs and white wooden turrets rise around you, a Victorian fantasy that has welcomed guests since February 19, 1888.

• Chula Vista / Border Proximity (South Bay)

  Chula Vista means beautiful view in Spanish, and around you sits San Diego County's second-largest city, shaped by its US-Mexico border position.

• US-Mexico Border Crossing Viewpoint (Border Region)

  More than 70,000 people cross legally every single day at San Ysidro, the busiest land border crossing in the world, and you have reached the…

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