The 7 Best Things to Do in Old Town San Diego, Ranked

Iipay ~ Tipai Kumeyaay Mut Niihepok covers 2.5 acres of what used to be a Caltrans office complex, and all of it is outdoors. A circular mosaic maps the Kumeyaay summer sky. Tilework traces the San Diego River and the things that lived in it. Signage runs in Kumeyaay, Spanish, and English, and tribal members from twelve Kumeyaay bands shaped the interpretation across years of meetings. Do this before anything else, and every 1769 date you read for the rest of the afternoon lands somewhere different.

One 1857 brick house held most of early San Diego's civic life at once: a county courthouse, a theater, a store, and the Whaley family's own rooms. The tour runs 30 to 40 minutes, and the interpretation stays careful about which parts are documented and which parts are only told. It is also the best-known haunted address in the county, and the evening programs go all the way in on that. Come in daylight for the courthouse and the theater. Come after dark if the ghost story is the point.

About 500 Latter-day Saints enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1846 and walked nearly 2,000 miles west without ever fighting a battle. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints runs this site and tells that story from the inside, as a free guided sequence of rooms, video, and artifacts that moves at its own fixed pace. The hands-on part comes at the end, with gold panning and brickmaking. Bring children. This is the stop in Old Town that was built for them.

Look down at the sidewalk on San Diego Avenue and you will find grave markers set into the concrete outside the cemetery wall. The burial ground was established in 1849, and those markers show how far it once reached before the street took the ground back. Inside the enclosure it is small and quiet and short on signage, so the visit is about noticing rather than reading. 10 minutes is enough. Give it those 10 minutes properly and the rest of Old Town stops looking like a set.

The hill is where Old Town's geography finally makes sense. Spain put a presidio and a mission up here in 1769 and nothing of either stands above ground now. What stands is a Spanish Revival museum by William Templeton Johnson, built to resemble the early missions, with a tower that gives you the coastline. The core exhibition runs from the Kumeyaay settlement of Kosaii through the archaeology of the Presidio. The park is open when the museum is not, and the paths and the overlook are why people keep climbing up here.

A row of Victorian houses was relocated onto this hillside, and Temple Beth Israel, San Diego's first synagogue building, stands among them. The Sherman-Gilbert, Bushyhead, Christian, and Burton houses are closed while their interiors are converted into overnight rooms, so this is an exterior walk for now. The upper lawn stays open through all of it, rebuilt with accessible pathways and a gazebo, and so does the synagogue. Come late in the day. Low sun on those facades is why people keep pointing cameras at this hillside.