Hawaiʻi Tropical Bioreserve & Garden
The garden holds palms, heliconias, orchids, aroids, bromeliads, and towering trees along a paved route through a naturally wet coastal valley.
Places and wildlife — page 20
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Honolulu Zoo
Honolulu Zoo occupies 42 acres between Waikīkī and Lēʻahi, with animals from tropical regions, children’s areas, and shaded botanical plantings.
Waikīkī Aquarium
Founded in 1904 beside a living reef, Waikīkī Aquarium focuses on tropical Pacific fishes, corals, giant clams, jellies, monk seals, and Hawaiian marine research.
Maui Ocean Center
Maui Ocean Center presents marine species found in Hawaiian waters, including reef fish, sharks, rays, corals, sea turtles, and deep-water interpretation.
Panaʻewa Rainforest Zoo and Gardens
Panaʻewa presents mammals, birds, reptiles, and extensive plantings on a manageable loop south of Hilo.
Getty Center
European paintings, drawings, photographs, decorative arts, conservation studios, Richard Meier architecture, and Robert Irwin’s Central Garden turn the Getty into a study of how collections are framed.
Getty Villa
Greek, Roman, and Etruscan objects sit within courtyards, gardens, pools, mosaics, and rooms modeled on the Villa dei Papiri.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
LACMA ranges from ancient American and Asian art to modern design, film, photography, and Southern California art.
The Broad
The Broad’s collection moves from Pop and Conceptual art to large-scale installations, with the building’s veil wrapping public galleries around visible storage.
California Academy of Sciences
Steinhart Aquarium, Morrison Planetarium, a four-story rainforest, natural-history halls, and active laboratories make the Academy a scientific campus rather than a single museum.
Exploratorium
The Exploratorium treats visitors as investigators: light, sound, motion, human behavior, weather, and estuary systems become manipulable exhibits.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
SFMOMA combines painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, media art, and a major living wall inside an expanded downtown building.
de Young Museum
The de Young is strongest where American painting, California art, Indigenous arts, African art, Oceanic collections, and textiles challenge a single national story.
Asian Art Museum
Masterworks from across South, Southeast, Central, East, and West Asia share space with contemporary commissions and changing interpretation.
Oakland Museum of California
OMCA combines three disciplines around terraced gardens, with community voices and contemporary issues placed beside artifacts, ecosystems, and art.
Bowers Museum
The Bowers holds California art, Native Californian material, Pacific collections, and rotating international exhibitions.
Norton Simon Museum
European paintings and sculpture, South and Southeast Asian art, modern works, and a sculpture garden fit within a museum whose scale encourages return viewing.
Petersen Automotive Museum
The Petersen ranges from experimental engineering and custom culture to Hollywood vehicles, motorcycles, racing, and Southern California car identity.
Griffith Observatory
Historic telescopes, planetarium programs, physics exhibits, and sweeping views make the observatory both laboratory and civic monument.
La Brea Tar Pits and Museum
Excavation pits, bubbling seeps, a working fossil lab, and mounted megafauna connect fieldwork to museum reconstruction.
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
The museum joins deep time to an urban nature lab, California history, mineral science, and a research collection far larger than what is displayed.
USS Midway Museum
The preserved USS Midway combines restored aircraft with bridge, flight deck, engine-room interpretation, and oral histories from sailors.
Fleet Science Center
Interactive galleries explore energy, engineering, perception, health, and technology, while the dome theater changes the pace from manipulation to immersion.
Crocker Art Museum
The Crocker combines a nineteenth-century residence with a contemporary expansion, linking California painting, European works, ceramics, Asian art, and works on paper.
Computer History Museum
Revolution follows computing from calculating machines through code, personal devices, the internet, and artificial intelligence.
Alcatraz Island
Cell blocks and escape stories draw attention, but Alcatraz also preserves military confinement, prison labor, gardens, bird habitat, and the 1969–71 Indians of All Tribes occupation.
Hearst Castle
Casa Grande, guest houses, pools, gardens, and an enormous art collection reveal William Randolph Hearst’s ambitions and Julia Morgan’s engineering command.
Manzanar National Historic Site
Manzanar preserves foundations, reconstructed barracks, gardens, cemetery, mess hall, guard towers, oral histories, and the stark geography of one Japanese American incarceration camp.
Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park
The visitor center, Ford Assembly Building, shipyard landscape, SS Red Oak Victory, memorial, and oral histories examine wartime migration, women’s labor, segregation, childcare, health, and industrial production.
César E. Chávez National Monument
Nuestra Señora Reina de la Paz preserves Chávez’s office, home landscape, memorial garden, union history, and the practical infrastructure of long-term organizing.
Angel Island Immigration Station
The detention barracks, hospital, administration remains, landscape, and Chinese-language poems document the immigration station that processed people from more than eighty countries.
Bodie State Historic Park
Weathered houses, mill works, stores, school, cemetery, interiors, and debris reveal boomtown systems after abandonment.
Empire Mine State Historic Park
Mine buildings, the shaft collar, machinery, offices, gardens, and the owner’s cottage reveal an industrial system extending more than a mile beneath the Sierra foothills.
Mission San Juan Capistrano
The Great Stone Church ruins, Serra Chapel, courtyards, bells, exhibits, and Acjachemen history form a visually compelling but contested mission landscape.
Old Mission Santa Barbara
Church, cemetery, museum rooms, gardens, waterworks, and archives reveal a site rebuilt after earthquakes and still occupied by Franciscans.
Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park
Rooms, workshops, walls, and exhibits interpret John Sutter’s agricultural empire, Native labor, overland migration, and California’s transfer from Mexico to the United States.
Old Town San Diego State Historic Park
Museums, reconstructed rooms, working businesses, plazas, and surviving adobes cover Kumeyaay homeland, Mexican governance, migration, commerce, and statehood.
Watts Towers
Seventeen interconnected structures rise from a small residential lot, carrying hand-set fragments, tools, names, and repeated forms built over more than three decades.
Chumash Painted Cave State Historic Park
Red, black, and white forms survive inside a small cave shielded by a metal gate.
Petroglyph Point
Geometric and figurative petroglyphs made by Modoc ancestors cover tuff walls once reached by canoe.
Painted Rock at Carrizo Plain
Painted Rock rises from grassland near Soda Lake, carrying Indigenous imagery, later markings, and evidence of repeated ceremonial importance.
Yosemite National Park
Yosemite joins Ahwahneechee homeland, glacial landforms, giant sequoias, climbing history, fire ecology, and a heavily managed visitor system across a park larger than Rhode Island.
Sequoia National Park
Giant Forest and the General Sherman Tree headline a park that climbs from oak foothills to Mount Whitney country.
Kings Canyon National Park
Grant Grove, the General Grant Tree, Kings Canyon Scenic Byway, Roaring River country, and vast backcountry show a park split between accessible groves and remote high terrain.
Joshua Tree National Park
Mojave Joshua-tree woodland descends toward Colorado Desert cactus, fan-palm oases, and broad basins.
Death Valley National Park
Badwater Basin, salt polygons, alluvial fans, dunes, canyons, mining ruins, and high peaks occupy a park larger than Connecticut.
Redwood National and State Parks
The joint federal-state system protects old-growth groves, Roosevelt elk habitat, wild coastline, salmon streams, and Yurok, Tolowa, and Chilula cultural landscapes.
Lassen Volcanic National Park
Lassen Peak, cinder cones, lava fields, boiling mudpots, steam vents, forests, and clear lakes compress Cascade volcanism into a drivable cross-section.