A youth charity built San Diego's tennis headquarters - then the pros came to it. The Barnes Tennis Center at 4490 West Point Loma Boulevard, beside the San Diego River near Ocean Beach, was built between 1995 and 1997 by Youth Tennis San Diego, the non-profit whose after-school programs have served the city's underserved neighbourhoods since 1953. The facility grew into one of the country's premier public racquet complexes: 25 tennis courts including two clay, 19 pickleball courts, 7 padel cour.....

Anchored by a classic wooden roller coaster on the sand at Mission Beach, Belmont Park is San Diego's long-running seaside amusement park, an old-fashioned mix of rides, arcade games, shops and beachfront restaurants that opened on 4 July 1925. Originally developed by the sugar magnate John D. Spreckels as part of an effort to draw San Diegans across the bay to his new Mission Bay neighbourhood, the park has weathered closures, redevelopments and the decline of seaside amusement parks across the.....

San Diego's heavy music headquarters has been holding the line in Bay Park since disco was king. The club at 1130 Buenos Avenue opened in 1976 as the Spirit of '76 - named for its founding year - and under founder Jerry Herrera became the main stage in pre-indie-rock San Diego where bands playing original music could get stage time, with a mention in Herrera's self-penned Reader adverts counting as a local badge of honour. In 1995 the room became Brick by Brick, and the booking turned decisively.....

On the Pacific shoreline just north of downtown San Diego, Mission Bay Park is the largest urban aquatic park in the United States and one of the most heavily visited public recreation areas in southern California. The 4,235-acre park encompasses some 2,000 acres of land and over 2,000 acres of protected water, with the meandering bay carved into a coastal salt marsh during the late 1940s through a vast public-works programme. The bay's creation transformed an unproductive tidal wetland known a.....

James Brown played the first concert in 1967, and more than 1,200 have followed - more than any other large venue in San Diego history. Pechanga Arena, at 3500 Sports Arena Boulevard in the Midway District, opened on 17 November 1966 as the San Diego International Sports Arena and remains the city's concert workhorse six decades on. The origin was private ambition: Bob Breitbard, a local football hero turned entrepreneur, leased 80 acres from the city and privately financed the 6.4-million-doll.....

Tucked between the city of San Diego and the long sweep of the Coronado peninsula, San Diego Bay is one of the most heavily used natural harbours on the West Coast and a defining feature of the southern California landscape. The roughly twelve-mile-long, four-mile-wide protected bay was carved by tectonic action over millennia, with the long Silver Strand of Coronado forming the natural breakwater that has made the bay one of the deepest and best-protected natural ports on the Pacific coast of t.....

On the southern shore of Mission Bay about ten miles north-west of downtown San Diego, SeaWorld San Diego is the original location of the international SeaWorld marine-life theme park chain and one of the most heavily visited theme parks in southern California. The 190-acre park opened in March 1964 as the brainchild of four University of California Los Angeles graduates who envisioned a marine-themed park combining a working oceanarium with a family-friendly theme park, with the original park c.....

The dressing rooms are old cinema projection offices; the bands look down at the crowd from where the film reels ran. SOMA San Diego at 3350 Sports Arena Boulevard is the city's defining all-ages venue, founded as an alcohol-free dance club in 1986 downtown and settled since 2002 into a converted multiplex whose theatre walls were knocked through to make one 2,300-capacity main hall. The lineage runs through three locations: the downtown original, then the 1994-1999 Metro Street warehouse era t.....

Every scene needs a first stage, and San Diego's is a 500-capacity room inside a converted cinema. The SOMA Sidestage at 3350 Sports Arena Boulevard is the smaller hall of SOMA San Diego's two-room operation - the all-ages institution founded in 1986 that has occupied its current multiplex-turned-venue since 2002. The room's job is developmental: local bands, opening-tier tours and scene showcases play the 30-foot stage with its built-in drum riser and MIDAS M32 console, graduating to the 2,300.....

On the rugged Pacific shoreline of the Point Loma peninsula about six miles west of downtown San Diego, Sunset Cliffs Natural Park preserves nearly a mile and a half of dramatically eroded sandstone cliffs along one of the most picturesque stretches of coastline in southern California. The 68-acre park was established in 1983 and is managed by the San Diego Parks and Recreation Department, with the surrounding Sunset Cliffs Boulevard providing one of the most scenic coastal drives in the city. .....