San Diego

San Diego was California before California was California — Spanish missionaries established the first of the state’s 21 missions here in 1769, and the city likes to remind visitors of this whenever the conversation drifts toward Los Angeles or San Francisco. For most of the 19th century it stayed a modest port town, overshadowed by its northern neighbors, until a very different kind of ambition arrived on the sandy peninsula across the bay.

That ambition built the Hotel del Coronado in 1888 — a sprawling wooden Victorian resort with red conical turrets, financed by developers who bet correctly that wealthy Americans would cross an entire continent for ocean air and a boardwalk. The bet paid off spectacularly. The Del became one of the largest wooden buildings in the country, wired for electric light by Thomas Edison’s own company, and has been drawing presidents, film crews, and honeymooners to the same stretch of sand for well over a century.

Coronado itself grew up around the hotel — a small, deliberately quiet town that still feels separate from San Diego proper despite sitting just across the bay. The Navy has a major presence here too, which gives the peninsula an odd, appealing mix of resort town and military town that neither Los Angeles nor San Francisco can claim.

San Diego rewards visitors who treat Coronado as a full day trip rather than a drive-by photo of the hotel. The beach, the ferry crossing from downtown, and the low-key village center are all part of what makes the Del’s setting work as well today as it did in 1888.