San Diego family guide

Things to Do in Hillcrest with Kids

Hillcrest is San Diego's vibrant, walkable urban village just northwest of Balboa Park, widely known as the heart of the city's LGBTQ community and marked by the neon Hillcrest sign over University Avenue. Its dense blocks of restaurants, cafes, and independent shops make it one of the most pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods in town. A large Sunday farmers market brings produce and street food to the center each week.

Curated by Simir Shah

Reviewed & updated August 2026 · we check listings regularly, but hours and prices change — confirm before you go.

Hillcrest on the map

📍 Where Hillcrest is

Hillcrest sits in San Diego, Southern California. Nearest major airport: San Diego Intl (~2 mi / 3 km). It's roughly 110 mi (176 km) from Downtown LA — SoCal traffic can make a drive take far longer than the distance suggests, so plan around it.

Visiting? See SoCal at a glance, getting around and which airport.

💡 Local tip: Hillcrest borders Balboa Park, so combine a museum or playground visit there with a walk to the neighborhood's cafes rather than driving between them.

Family attractions near Hillcrest

The closest kid-friendly attractions in neighboring towns — with driving distance from Hillcrest.

Animals & Nature · San Diego · 1.2 mi

San Diego Zoo

World-famous zoo in Balboa Park, home to more than 3,700 animals across 650+ species — including giant pandas Yun Chuan and Xin Bao, the first pandas back in the U.S. in 21 years, viewable at the expanded Denny Sanford Panda Ridge habitat since 2024. The Skyfari aerial tram, running since 1969, carries visitors nearly 1,800 feet above the canyons, and a kids' petting area rounds out a visit.

~$72 adult / ~$62 child

Museums & Learning · San Diego · 1.3 mi

San Diego Natural History Museum

"The Nat" traces its roots to 1874, making it the oldest scientific institution in Southern California, and moved to its current Balboa Park building in 1933. Beyond dinosaur fossils and a giant-screen theater, it runs ongoing field research across Southern California and Baja California.

~$22 adult / ~$14 child

Arts & Culture · San Diego · 1.3 mi

San Diego Museum of Art

Balboa Park's premier art museum with family art-making activities and a sculpture garden. The adjoining May S. Marcy Sculpture Garden displays works by Rodin and Calder and is free to walk through even without a museum ticket. Kids 17 and under get in free year-round, and the museum runs Family Drop-In Days with gallery games and hands-on art-making.

~$20 adult / under 17 free

Parks & Hiking · San Diego · 1.4 mi

Balboa Park

Sprawling 1,200-acre cultural park with gardens, fountains, Spanish-Revival architecture, and 17 museums. The land was set aside as a public park all the way back in 1868, but its signature look came later, when architect Bertram Goodhue designed the Spanish Colonial Revival buildings along El Prado for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition — a fair that drew nearly four million visitors in two years. Most of those exposition buildings still stand today, now housing the park's museums.

Free to enter; museums ticketed

Museums & Learning · San Diego · 1.4 mi

San Diego Model Railroad Museum

At 27,000 square feet, this is the world's largest operating model railroad museum, built on a model-railroading tradition in Balboa Park dating back to the 1935 exposition. Its scale layouts recreate four historic Southern California rail lines, including a two-level rendering of the famous Tehachapi Loop.

~$15 adult / kids free

Parks & Hiking · San Diego · 1.4 mi

Japanese Friendship Garden

Serene Balboa Park garden with koi ponds, bonsai, a waterfall, and seasonal cherry blossoms. Its roots go back to a Japanese teahouse and garden built for the 1915 exposition and tended for decades by the Asakawa family, until World War II forced its closure; the present-day garden reopened in 1990 through San Diego's sister-city ties with Yokohama. A 2015 expansion nearly doubled the garden to its current 11 acres.

~$16 adult / ~$8 child