Balboa Park

A 19th-century civic park transformed by two World's Fair-style expositions into one of the largest urban cultural parks in the United States, and the unlikely birthplace of the San Diego Zoo.

San Diego set aside roughly 1,400 acres of undeveloped mesa land as 'City Park' in 1868, one of the earliest urban parks reserved anywhere in the country, decades before it had any of the buildings or gardens that define it today. The park was renamed Balboa Park in 1910, honoring the Spanish explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa, in anticipation of a major exposition planned to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal.

That exposition, the Panama-California Exposition of 1915-1916, gave the park its architectural identity: architect Bertram Goodhue designed sweeping Spanish Colonial Revival buildings meant to evoke California's Spanish and Mexican heritage, many intended only as temporary exposition structures but later rebuilt to last. When the exposition closed, the animals that had been displayed there were not relocated, and the collection became the founding stock of the San Diego Zoo, formally established in 1916.

A second fair, the California Pacific International Exposition of 1935-1936, added still more buildings during the Depression to draw tourism, further expanding the park's cultural footprint. Today Balboa Park spans roughly 1,200 acres and houses 17 museums, several performing arts venues including the Old Globe Theatre, and the Spreckels Organ Pavilion, a 1914 gift from the Spreckels family that houses one of the largest outdoor pipe organs in the world.