Some people say San Diego lacks weather, but the city’s residents seem to be surviving just fine without it. In fact it’s the mildness of the climate that, above all, defines the city. Though it’s big, San Diego manages to hang on to a resort feel even amid the skyscrapers and brick facades of its revamped downtown. A huge influx of visitors helps add to the vacation atmosphere, from party-hearty undergrads to enthusiastic conventioneers. San Diego is also a favorite for family vacations, with kid-positive attractions like SeaWorld and the city’s world-famous zoo.
San Diego has reserved plenty of outdoor space to enjoy the weather, from beaches and boardwalks to the fields and footpaths of sprawling Balboa Park. This is a place where life is lived outdoors, so it’s not surprising that fitness is a religion. Sit at a café long enough, and you are bound to hear talk of 10K races, if not triathlons.
Humans have been enjoying San Diego’s climate since at least 18,000 BC, if the middens (ancient refuse heaps) that litter the region are any proof. By the time Spanish explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo became the first European to sail into San Diego Bay in 1542, the region was divided peaceably between the native Kumeyaay and Luiseño/Juaneño peoples. Their way of life continued undisturbed until Junípero Serra and Gaspar de Portola arrived in 1769. They founded a mission and a military fort on the hill now known as the Presidio, making it the first permanent European settlement in California.
When the United States took California from Mexico in the 1840s, San Diego remained little more than a ramshackle village. But William Heath Davis, a San Francisco property speculator, knew there was a fortune to be made. In the 1850s, he bought 160 acres of bayfront property and erected prefabricated houses, a wharf and warehouses. ‘Davis’ Folly’ eventually went bust, but only because he was ahead of this time. Just a decade later, another San Francisco speculator acquired 960 acres of waterfront land and promoted it as ‘New Town.’ This time the idea stuck, and Alonzo E Horton became a rich man.
The discovery of gold in the hills east of San Diego in 1869 certainly helped. The ensuing rush brought the railroad to San Diego in 1884, and also led to the development of a classic Wild West culture, with saloons, gambling houses and brothels hidden behind the respectable Victorian facades of the city’s Gaslamp Quarter.
San Diego hosted the Panama-California Exposition in 1915 and 1916, hoping to attract investment to a city with a deepwater port, a railroad hub and a perfect climate. To give San Diego a unique image, boosters built exhibition halls in the romantic, Spanish colonial style that still defines much of the city today.
The opening of the University of California campus in the 1960s heralded a new era as students and faculty slowly drove a liberal wedge into the city’s homogenous, flag-and-family culture. The university, especially strong in the sciences, has also been a fine incubator for the biotech sector. The military still plays a major role in San Diego County, accounting for at least a fourth of its economic activity.
