24 hours in San Diego: what to see

San Diego contains within a single urban park seventeen museums, botanical gardens and one of the world's most celebrated zoos, a concentration of attractions rare even by California standards.

Border city with Mexico overlooking the Pacific, it boasts one of the most stable climates in the United States and a historic neighbourhood that still recalls the golden age of jazz and Prohibition.

Balboa Park is the natural starting point: the large urban park built for an international exhibition in 1915 hosts architecture in Spanish colonial style, botanical gardens, and the famous San Diego Zoo, among the most visited in the world.

Inside the park you also find numerous museums, from the Museum of Natural History to the Museum of Man, all reachable on foot along the park's central avenue.

Heading down to the center you reach the Gaslamp Quarter, the historic neighborhood with its Victorian architecture, today animated by restaurants and venues that make it the heart of the city's nightlife.

For lunch, one of the restaurants in the Gaslamp Quarter offers Mexican cuisine and seafood, among the most rooted specialties of the city.

The USS Midway Museum, the World War II aircraft carrier transformed into a floating museum, moored on the downtown waterfront.

Further north, La Jolla Cove is the rocky inlet where sea lions and elephant seals gather on the beach practically in contact with visitors.

As evening falls, heading back to the Gaslamp Quarter, the restaurants in the neighborhood lend themselves well to dinner, with live jazz and the Victorian atmosphere of its illuminated streets.

Balboa Park, the zoo, and Gaslamp Quarter already tell San Diego's cultural and historical duality well, while an afternoon choice between USS Midway and La Jolla Cove brings the military or naturalistic side.

The San Diego de Alcalá mission and a trip to Coronado, with its beach and historic Del Coronado hotel, remain chapters for a second journey. Watching sea lions bask on the rocks of La Jolla Cove remains San Diego's most memorable detail.