Spread across some 1,200 acres in the heart of San Diego, Balboa Park is the largest urban cultural park in the United States and a beloved centrepiece of the city's public life. The land was set aside as a public reserve in 1868 under the name City Park, making it one of the earliest formal public parks in the American West, and was renamed in honour of the Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa in 1910 ahead of the great Panama-California Exposition. That 1915 exposition, and a smaller seco.....

San Diego's Spanish Revival palace waited 22 dark years for its second act. The Balboa Theatre at 868 Fourth Avenue, beside the old Horton Plaza in the Gaslamp Quarter, opened on 28 March 1924 - architect William Wheeler's 800,000-dollar vaudeville and movie house crowned with its signature tiled dome, cooled by twin waterfall grottoes flanking the proscenium, and seating over 1,500 as downtown's first great picture palace. The building lived several lives - the Fox-run El Teatro Balboa era of .....

In the historic Old Town district of San Diego, GoCar offers one of the most unusual ways to explore the city, a fleet of brightly coloured, three-wheeled, two-seater vehicles equipped with talking GPS tour guides that lead drivers along carefully chosen scenic and historic routes. The company first opened in San Francisco in 2004 with a small fleet of European-made motorised "Carvers" and later branched into San Diego and several other tourist destinations, including Lisbon, Miami and Barcelona.....

The Wailers opened it, George Clinton played night two, and the Blues Brothers themselves - Dan Aykroyd and Jim Belushi - headlined the grand-opening weekend. House of Blues San Diego, at 1055 Fifth Avenue in the old Woolworth building between Broadway and C Street downtown, opened on 11 May 2005 as the ninth club in the chain. The 31,000-square-foot conversion turned the department store into a multi-level concert hall of roughly 1,500 capacity with box seats and a dance floor, plus a 215-seat.....

In the bustling Mission Valley area of San Diego, iFLY San Diego offers the unmistakable rush of free fall without the small matter of an aircraft. Part of the international network of iFLY indoor skydiving facilities built around the same proven technology, the venue uses a powerful vertical wind tunnel to lift visitors on a smooth, controllable column of moving air, providing a safe, weatherproof and remarkably accessible way to experience true skydiving sensations at ground level, only minute.....

The theatre opened one week after the 1929 stock market crash - and 95 years later it emerged from a 125-million-dollar rebuild as one of America's most advanced concert halls. Jacobs Music Center, at 750 B Street in downtown San Diego, is the home of the San Diego Symphony: born the Fox Theatre in 1929, renamed Copley Symphony Hall in 1985, and reopened in its current form on 28 September 2024. William Fox's San Diego movie palace, by architects Weeks and Day, was the grandest thing the city h.....

The building San Diegans call the Slim Gym was a Christmas present: at a 1997 holiday party, Sidney Craig surprised his wife - weight-loss entrepreneur Jenny Craig - by announcing a 10-million-dollar gift in her name to build it. The Jenny Craig Pavilion, at 5998 Alcala Park Way on the University of San Diego campus, opened on 5 October 2000 as the 5,100-seat home of the Toreros. The arena replaced a gym with a famous embarrassment: the old USD Sports Center's advertised 2,500-seat capacity tur.....

The clamshell stage hosted Bob Hope in the 1940s and the sunken dance floor appeared in Top Gun - then the room sat dormant for decades until a 34-million-dollar restoration woke it up. Lou Lou's Jungle Room, in the basement of the Lafayette Hotel at 2223 El Cajon Boulevard in San Diego, opened on 20 January 2024 with a sold-out Thee Sacred Souls show. The bones are mid-century glamour: the 1946 Lafayette was mid-city San Diego's celebrity playground, and its underground ballroom - later known .....

On the Embarcadero waterfront in downtown San Diego just opposite the bustling Broadway Pier, the Maritime Museum of San Diego operates one of the largest collections of historic seafaring vessels in the United States. The non-profit museum was founded in 1948 with the acquisition of the iron-hulled barque Star of India, the oldest active sailing ship in the world, and has grown over the intervening decades into a fleet of more than a dozen historic and replica vessels permanently moored along t.....

Morgan Wallen and Megan Moroney both played the room before stadium fame - a honky-tonk two blocks from the Pacific where line dancing at 8 gives way to a full nightclub by 10. Moonshine Beach, at 1165 Garnet Avenue in San Diego's Pacific Beach, is the neighbourhood's country outpost. The operator built a small empire: Good Time Design - founded in 2006 by hospitality entrepreneur Ty Hauter and based between San Diego and Nashville - runs Moonshine Beach as the beach-town sibling of downtown's .....