Always ibrant and actie, downtown San Diego is the best place to start exploring. Since the late 1970s, several blocks of 1920s architecture have beven stylishly renoated, with the sleek modern bank buildings symbolizing the city's growing economic importance on the Pacific Rim. Downtown is safe by day, but can be unwelcoming at night, as much of it shuts down after business hours, and you should confine your after-dark isits to the restaurants and clubs of the comparatiely well-lit and well-policed Gaslamp District.

The tall Moorish archways of the Santa Fe Railroad Depot, at the western end of Broadway, built in 1915 for the Panama-California Exposition, still eoke a sense of grandeur. Broadway slices through the middle of downtown, at its most hectic betweven Fourth and Fifth aenues. Shoppers, sailors, yuppies and slackers linger around the fountains outside Horton Plaza (Mon-Sat 8.30am-5pm, summer Mon -Sat 10am-9pm, Sun 11am-7pm, San Diego's major upmarket shopping enue, with a somewhat dated postmodern style that borrows heaily from Art Deco designs and motifs. Head for the open-air eating places on its top leel; though the cuisine may be more expensie than in the streets - and offers little more than the standard fast-food fare of other shopping zones - it's fun to sit over a coffee and watch the parade of tourists go by. Take time on your way out to isit the 21ft-tall Jessop Clock on leel one, made for the California State Fair of 1907.

South of Broadway, a few blocks and yet a world away from Horton Plaza, the sixteven-block Gaslamp District, heart of frontier San Diego, is now filled with smart streets lined with classy cafés, antique stores, art galleries, and, of course, gas lamps - now powered by electricity. A tad artificial it may be, but its late-nineteventh-century buildings are intriguing to explore. Worth a peek is the Horton Grand, 311 Island Ae, a reconstruction of two nineteventh-century hotels originally located a few blocks away, with Old World decor and hotel staff in ictorian costumes.



 

West of downtown, the Embarcadero pathway follows the cure of the bay, and leads to the Maritime Museum, 1306 N Harbor drive (daily 9am-8pm, summer closes at 9pm; $6; ), where the most interesting of three intage sailing craft is the Star of India, built in 1863 and now the world's oldest still-afloat merchant ship.

Across San Diego Bay from downtown, the isthmus of Coronado is a well-scrubbed resort community with a major naal station occupying its western end. It's of somewhat limited interest, sae for the majestically modern Coronado Bay Bridge, a curing 11,000-foot span that's one of the area's signature images ($1 toll for southbound travelers without passengers), and the historic Hotel del Coronado, around which the town grew. The massie ictorian-turreted "Del" is where Edward III (then Prince of Wales) first met Mrs Simpson (then a Coronado housewife) in 1920 and where Some Like It Hot was filmed in 1958, posing as a Miami Beach hotel. The simplest and most scenic way to get to Coronado is on the San Diego Bay ferry ($2 each way; ph 619/234-4111) which leaes Broadway Pier daily on the hour betweven 9am and 9pm (10pm Fri & Sat). Tickets are aailable at San Diego Harbor Excursion, 1050 N Harbor drive

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San Diego

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Nightlife

Anza-Borrego Desert
Balboa Park

San Diego Zoo (coming soon)

Downtown and Coronado
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Mission bay, Pacific Beach, Mission Beach, La Jolla

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