San Diego

Balboa Park is the civilisational argument that San Diego makes to the rest of the country. Twelve hundred acres of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture, museums, gardens, and performance venues — all of it built for the Panama-California Exposition of 1915 and kept intact in the century since. The Natural History Museum, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Timken Museum with its genuine Old Masters — it is an improbable cultural density for a city that most people associate primarily with weather and beaches.

The park's central Prado walkway, lined with coral trees and the ornate facades of the exposition buildings, is genuinely beautiful in the way that intentional civic space sometimes manages to be. Late afternoon, when the light catches the tile domes and the crowds have thinned, it is one of the better places to simply exist in Southern California.

La Jolla — meaning "the jewel" in Spanish — is where the city's coastline becomes genuinely dramatic. The cliffs above the cove are sandstone carved by the Pacific into shapes that look deliberate, and below them the sea lions have claimed a stretch of beach that they defend with impressive authority. The snorkelling and diving in the cove is among the best accessible ocean diving in California.

The Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve, at the northern edge of La Jolla, is where California's rarest pine tree grows along cliff-top trails with views of the Pacific that reward the walk with a particular clarity on winter mornings after the marine layer lifts.