San Diego

San Diego holds a genuine claim to being where European settlement of the US West Coast began — Spanish missionaries founded Mission San Diego de Alcalá here in 1769, the first of what would become a chain of 21 California missions, predating the founding of Los Angeles and San Francisco by over a decade.

The San Diego Zoo, opened in 1916 and expanded substantially over the following decades, became genuinely influential in how zoos are designed worldwide — it was among the first major institutions to replace barred cages with open, moat-separated naturalistic enclosures, an approach now considered standard practice, and it pioneered conservation breeding programs that have since helped pull several species back from the edge of extinction.

Balboa Park, the sprawling cultural park that houses the zoo alongside more than a dozen museums and gardens, was built up substantially around the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, and its Spanish Colonial Revival architecture from that era still defines much of the park's look today, a deliberate style choice tying back to the city's Spanish colonial founding.

The city's coastline splits into genuinely distinct character zones — La Jolla's dramatic sea cliffs and resident sea lion colony sit in stark contrast to Coronado's flat, wide sand and the Victorian-era Hotel del Coronado, while Pacific Beach's boardwalk carries a livelier, more youth-oriented energy than either.

San Diego's proximity to the Mexican border, just a short drive to Tijuana, gives the city a genuine binational character reflected heavily in its food and culture — the California-style fish taco, now found across the country, traces its US popularization directly to San Diego surfers who picked up the dish from Baja California in the 1980s.