Balboa Park

Overlooking downtown and the Pacific Ocean, 1,200-acre Balboa Park is the cultural heart of San Diego. Ranked as one of the world's best parks by the Project for Public Spaces, it's also where you can find most of the city's museums, art galleries, the Tony Award-winning Globe Theatre, and the world-famous San Diego Zoo. Most first-time visitors see only these attractions, but the "Smithsonian of the West" is really a series of botanical gardens. Thanks to the "Mother of Balboa Park," Kate Sessions, who suggested hiring a landscape architect in 1889, gardens both cultivated and wild are an integral part of the park, featuring 350 species of trees. What Balboa Park would have looked like had she left it alone can be seen at Florida Canyon (between the main park and Morley Field, along Park Boulevard)—an arid landscape of sagebrush, cactus, and a few small trees.

Historic buildings dating from San Diego's 1915 Panama-California International Exposition are strung along the park's main east-west thoroughfare, El Prado, which leads from 6th Avenue eastward over the Cabrillo Bridge (formerly the Laurel Street Bridge), the park's official gateway. If you're a cinema fan, many of the buildings may be familiar—Orson Welles used exteriors of several Balboa Park buildings to represent the Xanadu estate of Charles Foster Kane in his 1941 classic, Citizen Kane. Prominent among them was the California Building, whose 200-foot tower, housing a 100-carillon bell that tolls the hour, is El Prado's tallest structure. Missing from the black-and-white film, however, was the magnificent blue of its tiled dome shining in the sun.

The parkland across the Cabrillo Bridge, at the west end of El Prado, is set aside for picnics and athletics. Rollerbladers zip along Balboa Drive, which leads to the highest spot in the park, Marston Point, overlooking downtown. At the green beside the bridge, ladies and gents in all-white outfits meet regularly on summer afternoons for lawn-bowling tournaments—a throwback to an earlier era.

East of Plaza de Panama, El Prado becomes a pedestrian mall and ends at a footbridge that crosses over Park Boulevard, the park's main north-south thoroughfare, to the perfectly tended Rose Garden, which has more than 2,000 rosebushes. In the adjacent Desert Garden, trails wind around prickly cacti and soft green succulents from around the world. Palm Canyon, north of the Spreckels Organ Pavilion, has more than 50 varieties of palms along a shady bridge. Pepper Grove, along Park Boulevard south of the museums, has lots of picnic tables as well as play equipment.

Parking near Balboa Park's museums is no small accomplishment, especially on sunny summer days, when the lots, which are all free, fill up quickly. If you're driving in via the Cabrillo Bridge, the first parking area you come to is off El Prado to the right, going toward Pan American Plaza. Don't despair if there are no spaces here; you'll see more lots as you continue along the same road. If you end up parking a bit far from your destination, consider the stroll back through the greenery part of the day's recreation. Alternatively, you can just park at Inspiration Point on the east side of the park, off Presidents Way. Free trams run from there to the museums every 15-20 minutes, 9:30-6:30 daily.