Things to Do in San Diego with Kids

Free to walk; pedicab rides and vendor food extra

The Embarcadero

A mile-long waterfront promenade along San Diego Bay, running past Seaport Village, the Maritime Museum, and the Broadway Pier, with the Marriott Marquis San Diego Marina anchoring its northern end. Street performers and vendors cluster near Seaport Village, pedicabs run the length of the bayfront, and the view regularly includes yachts docked in the marina alongside Navy ships out on the bay — a legacy of Naval Base San Diego's presence just across the water.

Animals & Nature

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 the Wildlife Explorers Basecamp area is built for younger kids.

~$72 adult / ~$62 child

Free to enter; museums ticketed

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.

~$25 adult / ~$22 child (incl. IMAX)

Fleet Science Center

Hands-on science museum in Balboa Park, opened in 1973 as the first science center in the world to pair interactive exhibits with a planetarium and dome theater — a format now standard at major science museums. Its giant-dome IMAX theater was the first of its kind anywhere.

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

San Diego Air & Space Museum

Iconic round Balboa Park museum housed in the 1935 Art Deco Ford Building, with a rotunda shaped like a giant gear at its center. The collection has grown from 25 aircraft when it moved in here in 1980 to more than 80 today, spanning early flight to the space age, alongside a flight simulator.

~$24 adult / ~$15 child

~$20 adult / under 17 free

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

Arts & Culture

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.

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

USS Midway Museum

Tour a real retired aircraft carrier on the Embarcadero — the USS Midway was the U.S. Navy's longest-serving carrier of the 20th century, commissioned in 1945 and active for nearly 47 years through Vietnam and the Gulf War. Since opening as a museum in 2004, it's become the most-visited ship museum in the world, with flight-deck jets and a flight simulator to explore.

~$34 adult / ~$24 child

Maritime Museum of San Diego

Historic ships on the Embarcadero including the Star of India, an 1863 iron-hulled tall ship that holds the Guinness World Record as the oldest active sailing ship on Earth, having circled the globe 21 times. Climb through the B-39, a real Cold War-era Soviet submarine that played a role in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

~$24 adult / ~$14 child

Indoor Play

The New Children's Museum

This downtown museum, opened in 2008 in a green building designed by architect Rob Wellington Quigley, commissions contemporary artists to build room-sized interactive art installations kids can climb through and explore. Its Artopia studios add hands-on workshops in painting, drawing, and pottery.

~$15 per person

Shopping & Treats

Seaport Village

Waterfront shopping and dining village on the Embarcadero, home to a hand-carved 1895 carousel by noted carver Charles I.D. Looff, the same craftsman behind the Santa Monica Pier carousel, that traveled through five cities before landing here in 2004. Fifty-four carved animals and two chariots still turn today alongside the bayfront strolls.

Free to stroll

Waterfront Park

Downtown bayfront park with a huge interactive fountain kids splash in and big lawns for play. The 12-acre park opened in 2014 on what used to be surface parking lots around the County Administration Center, a 1938 landmark building constructed on infilled tidelands as part of a decades-old vision for a public downtown waterfront. The interactive fountain flows directly out from the historic building into the open lawn, tying the old architecture to the new public space.

Cabrillo National Monument

Point Loma landmark with sweeping bay views, a historic lighthouse, and tide pools at low tide. The monument marks the 1542 landing of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, the first European to set foot on the West Coast, on land the Kumeyaay people had inhabited for thousands of years before him. The Old Point Loma Lighthouse, which guided ships from the bluff above until it was retired in 1891, still stands and can be toured, and low tide exposes some of the best-protected tide pools in the county.

~$20 per vehicle (7-day)

Sunset Cliffs Natural Park

Dramatic Point Loma sea cliffs famous for tide pools, sunset views, and coastal walking paths. The Kumeyaay people used this shoreline for food and medicine long before sports magnate Albert Spalding carved paths and stairways into the cliffs in 1915; the park wasn't formally dedicated until 1983. The sandstone cliffs themselves are around 120,000 years old and have even yielded fossils of ancient marine reptiles.

Ocean Beach Pier & Beach

Laid-back beach with a wide sandy stretch and a long fishing pier. Opened in 1966 as the longest concrete pier on the West Coast at nearly 2,000 feet, the pier has been closed since storm damage in late 2023 left it structurally unsafe; the city is now planning a full replacement rather than repairs, with construction not expected to start until around 2029. The beach itself remains open and popular for surfing and sunset walks even with the pier off-limits.

Free entry; rides ~$6 each

Theme Parks & Rides

Belmont Park

Mission Beach boardwalk amusement park built in 1925 by developer John D. Spreckels, anchored by the Giant Dipper — a wooden coaster built in just four weeks that's now a National Historic Landmark and one of only two vintage wooden coasters left in California. It closed for a stretch in the late 1970s-80s before reopening in 1990 and remains a beachfront classic today.

Mission Beach Boardwalk

Lively oceanfront boardwalk for biking, skating, and swimming along miles of sandy beach. The 3.5-mile boardwalk was built in 1925 alongside Belmont Park, developed by sugar magnate John D. Spreckels to help sell real estate in the new Mission Beach neighborhood. Belmont Park's wooden Giant Dipper roller coaster from that same era still operates today and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Pacific Beach

Popular family beach with gentle surf, Crystal Pier, and a walkable boardwalk full of eateries. Crystal Pier opened in 1927 and has offered overnight stays in cottages built right over the water since 1930, a rarity on the West Coast. The Allen family, who took over ownership in the 1960s, still runs the pier and its hotel today.

Free entry; some attractions paid

Old Town San Diego State Historic Park

Living-history park recreating 1800s San Diego with restored buildings, museums, and Mexican restaurants.

Shopping & Treats

Liberty Station / Liberty Public Market

Former naval base turned arts district, built on the site of the Naval Training Center San Diego, which trained recruits from 1923 until it closed in 1997 and was handed to the city in 2000. The old mess hall is now Liberty Public Market, a food hall with more than 25 vendors, alongside a waterfront promenade and open lawns.

Free entry; food/shops vary

Arts & Culture

Spanish Village Art Center

Colorful Balboa Park courtyard of working artist studios where kids can watch artists create. The whitewashed, red-tile buildings were built quickly in 1935 as temporary exhibit space for a world's fair, never meant to last — but local artists talked the city into letting them move into the empty structures the following year. The buildings served as Army barracks during World War II before artists returned in 1947, and the Village now houses more than 200 working artisans in open studios.

Free to browse

Mission Trails Regional Park

One of the largest urban parks in the U.S. with kid-friendly trails, a visitor center, and Lake Murray. At 5,800 acres and about 60 miles of trails, it's billed as the largest urban open-space park west of the Mississippi, and its Cowles Mountain trail climbs to the highest point in the city of San Diego at 1,592 feet. Lake Murray, a reservoir built in 1894 at the park's edge, adds flatter shoreline walking and boating for families who want an easier day.

Free walk-in; parking ~$15-25

Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve

Coastal bluff reserve with rare pines and easy trails leading to ocean overlooks and the beach below. The reserve protects the Torrey pine, one of the rarest pine species in North America — found naturally in only two spots on Earth, here and on Santa Rosa Island 175 miles up the coast. San Diego set the land aside as early as 1899, and philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps later donated key groves in 1936 before it became a state reserve. Note: State Parks has closed the reserve road, upper parking lots and trails from September 21, 2026 until about March 1, 2027 for a utility project; Torrey Pines State Beach and its beach-level lots stay open.