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San Diego has the geography of a paradise and the history of a frontier. The Kumeyaay people called the bay Kosa'aay and lived here for thousands of years before Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo anchored offshore in 1542. The first European settlement followed in 1769 with the Presidio on the hill above Old Town and Mission San Diego de Alcala in the valley below, making San Diego the oldest European settlement in California, a fact that most visitors discover only after assuming the opposite. Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis was built in a Ryan Airlines hangar here in 1927 before his solo transatlantic flight.

The city's approximately 200 canyons and hills divide it into neighborhoods with dramatically different characters.

Balboa Park, built for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, contains 17 museums, the San Diego Zoo, and a collection of Spanish Colonial Revival buildings so theatrical they were partially designed as permanent infrastructure to replace what were intended as temporary exposition structures. The Gaslamp Quarter downtown occupies blocks of Victorian commercial buildings from the 1880s that survived the city's various redevelopment phases. La Jolla sits on sea cliffs above coves where leopard sharks congregate in summer shallows and harbor seals haul out year-round.