Places to visit in California, United States
37 places to visit in California, United States, each with LOQAH's carefully crafted stamp of its own: Redwood National and State Parks, Yosemite National Park, 17-Mile Drive and more. Stand at any of them with the app open and the stamp is yours, confirmed on site, in your California volume.
2 UNESCO World Heritage sites · 32 Famous places to visit · 3 Hidden gems
UNESCO World Heritage sites in California (2)
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Redwood National and State Parks
Four parks along the northern California coast, one national and three state, managed together to guard the tallest trees on Earth. Between them they hold 45 percent of the old growth coast redwood forest still standing, along with wild beaches and prairie.
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Yosemite National Park
A park in the Sierra Nevada known for its granite cliffs, waterfalls and groves of giant sequoias, and a World Heritage Site since 1984. Almost all of it is wilderness, and the valley at its centre, walled in by El Capitan and Half Dome, is where most visitors begin.
Famous places to visit in California (32)
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17-Mile Drive
A scenic road around the Monterey Peninsula through Pebble Beach and Pacific Grove, much of it right above the Pacific. It passes famous golf courses, grand houses, Bird Rock and the Lone Cypress, and runs through the Monterey cypress woods of Del Monte Forest.
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Alcatraz Island
A small rocky island in San Francisco Bay that has held a lighthouse, a military fort and, from 1934 to 1963, a federal prison thought nearly impossible to escape because of the cold water and strong currents. Ferries now carry visitors out to walk its old cellhouse.
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Apple Park
The headquarters of Apple in Cupertino, a single ring shaped building around a wooded park, which staff began moving into in 2017. The campus itself is closed to the public, but its visitor centre across the road has a rooftop terrace and a model of the whole site.
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BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, Chino Hills
A Hindu temple complex in Chino Hills belonging to the BAPS Swaminarayan tradition, its domes and pillars carved from stone in the traditional style. It is a place of worship for the community and is open to visitors of all faiths.
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Balboa Park
A 490 hectare historic park in the middle of San Diego, set aside for public use as long ago as 1835. Its Spanish Revival buildings from the 1915 exposition house museums and theatres, gardens line the Prado, and the San Diego Zoo sits within its grounds.
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Big Sur
A rugged stretch of California's Central Coast between Carmel and San Simeon, where the Santa Lucia Mountains rise straight out of the Pacific. Highway 1 clings to the cliffs above the sea, past redwood canyons, beaches and the arch of Bixby Bridge.
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Computer History Museum
A museum in Mountain View, in the heart of Silicon Valley, telling the story of computing and the information age. Its collection of machines and artefacts traces how the region's inventions changed the way the world works and lives.
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Death Valley National Park
A vast desert park east of the Sierra Nevada, straddling the California and Nevada border. It holds the lowest point in North America at Badwater Basin and some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded, with salt flats, dunes and coloured hills between bare mountain ranges.
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Disney California Adventure
The second theme park at the Disneyland Resort, opened in 2001 across the plaza from Disneyland. Its 29 hectares are Disney's take on California, with areas themed on Pixar films and Marvel heroes alongside a seaside pier.
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Disneyland
The first theme park opened by the Walt Disney Company and the only one built under Walt Disney's own eye, opened in Anaheim on 17 July 1955. Main Street, U.S.A. leads to Sleeping Beauty Castle and the themed lands that later Disney parks around the world would follow.
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Fisherman's Wharf
The old fishing port on San Francisco's northern waterfront, where seafood stands, sourdough bakeries and souvenir shops have taken over from most of the fishing boats. Crab still steams at the pavement stalls, and the Aquatic Park historic district sits at its western end.
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Getty Center
A hilltop campus designed by Richard Meier, home to the J. Paul Getty Museum and opened in 1997. A small cable driven train carries visitors up from the car park to galleries of European art, landscaped gardens and wide views over Los Angeles.
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Golden Gate Bridge
A suspension bridge painted International Orange, carrying road, foot and bicycle traffic across the 1.6 km strait between San Francisco and Marin County. When it opened in 1937 it had the longest main span in the world, and its towers often rise out of the fog.
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Golden Gate Park
San Francisco's largest park, 412 hectares stretching west to the Pacific between the Richmond and Sunset districts. Among its meadows and old growth woods sit the Japanese Tea Garden, the Conservatory of Flowers and the de Young museum.
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Griffith Observatory
An observatory on the southern slope of Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park, looking out over the Los Angeles Basin to the Pacific. Its telescopes, planetarium and space exhibits have drawn stargazers since 1935, and its terraces have a close view of the Hollywood Sign.
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Half Dome
A granite dome at the eastern end of Yosemite Valley, with three smooth rounded sides and one sheer face, so that it looks like a dome cut in two. Its summit stands more than 2,680 metres above sea level.
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Hollywood Sign
Nine white letters, each almost 14 metres tall, on the slope of Mount Lee above Los Angeles. Put up in 1923 as an advertisement for a housing estate called Hollywoodland, it lost its last four letters in 1949 and was rebuilt in steel in 1978.
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Hollywood Walk of Fame
More than 2,800 brass and terrazzo stars set into the pavements of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, each honouring a name from the entertainment industry. Actors and musicians share them with inventors and even fictional characters, and the busiest stretch runs past the TCL Chinese Theatre.
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Joshua Tree National Park
A desert park in southeastern California, named for the spiky Joshua trees that grow across it. Piles of giant granite boulders draw climbers, and after decades as a national monument from 1936 it became a national park in 1994.
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Lake Tahoe
The largest alpine lake in North America, about 1,900 metres up in the Sierra Nevada across the line between California and Nevada. At 501 metres it is the second deepest lake in the United States, and its water is famously clear and blue.
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Lombard Street
One steep block of a long San Francisco street, on Russian Hill, that twists through eight hairpin bends between flowerbeds. Billed as the crookedest street in the world, it draws a steady stream of cars inching down and people photographing them from the bottom.
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Monterey Bay Aquarium
An aquarium on Cannery Row devoted to the life of the bay outside its windows. It was the first to show a living kelp forest when it opened in 1984, and its jellyfish galleries and sea otters are what most people come to see.
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Muir Woods National Monument
A valley of old growth coast redwoods on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais, about 19 km north of San Francisco and named after the naturalist John Muir. Trails run beneath trees that form one of the few such stands left in the Bay Area.
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Napa Valley
A wine valley north of San Francisco, recognised in 1981 as only the second American Viticultural Area in the country. Vineyards cover the valley floor between low hills, with wineries and tasting rooms strung along the road from Napa up to Calistoga.
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Painted Ladies
A row of Victorian houses facing Alamo Square, painted in three or more colours to pick out their carved trim. The name for San Francisco's brightly repainted Victorians dates from 1978, and this row, with the downtown skyline behind it, is the one on the postcards.
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Palace of Fine Arts
A domed rotunda and curving colonnade beside a lagoon in the Marina District, built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. It is the only structure from that fair still standing on its site, though it was entirely rebuilt between 1964 and 1974.
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Pier 39
A pier on the San Francisco waterfront turned into shops, restaurants, street performers and a two storey carousel, with the Aquarium of the Bay alongside. Its real draw is the California sea lions that haul out in noisy heaps on the floating docks of its marina.
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San Diego Zoo
A zoo in Balboa Park that began with animals left over from the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, gathered by its founder Harry Wegeforth. It helped pioneer open air exhibits without cages that recreate the natural habitats of the animals.
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Santa Monica Pier
A long pier at the foot of Colorado Avenue, reaching out from the beach into the Pacific. It carries a small amusement park with a Ferris wheel and roller coaster, food stands and fishing spots, and marks the symbolic end of Route 66.
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Sequoia National Park
Forested mountains in the southern Sierra Nevada, protected in 1890 for their giant sequoias, among them the General Sherman Tree, the largest tree on Earth by volume. The park's eastern edge reaches Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States.
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USS Midway Museum
A retired aircraft carrier moored at Navy Pier on the San Diego waterfront, now a museum. Its hangar and flight deck hold a large collection of aircraft, many of them built in southern California.
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Universal Studios Hollywood
One of the oldest Hollywood film studios still at work, in Universal City, which has grown into a theme park. It began as tours of the real studio sets, still run today on the tram tour, and now has rides built on Universal's films alongside them.
Hidden gems in California (3)
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Gurdwara Sahib Fremont
A Sikh house of worship in Fremont that serves the whole San Francisco Bay Area, from Marin and Solano to Santa Clara. It counts among the most influential gurdwaras anywhere, and runs summer Gurmat camps for young Sikhs alongside its daily prayers and langar.
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Gurdwara Sahib Stockton
The first Sikh house of worship in the United States, in the Central Valley city of Stockton. It was opened in 1912 by Punjabi settlers who had come to work the farms of the valley, and it still serves as a gurdwara today.
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Malibu Hindu Temple
A temple to Lord Venkateswara in the Santa Monica Mountains near Malibu, built in 1981 in the traditional South Indian style. Run by the Hindu Temple Society of Southern California, it holds daily rituals and festival ceremonies led by its priests.
Collecting in California
What are the best places to visit in California?
LOQAH lists 37 places in California. The best known include Redwood National and State Parks, Yosemite National Park, 17-Mile Drive, Alcatraz Island and Apple Park. Each has a stamp of its own to collect when you are there.
How many LOQAH stamps are there in California?
37, and more are added over time. Each place has LOQAH's carefully crafted stamp of its own.
How do I collect a stamp in California?
Open LOQAH at the place and get its stamp. LOQAH checks where you are once, at that moment; at the place itself the stamp is confirmed on site, with a gold badge.
I have been to places in California before. Can I add them?
Yes. In Earlier trips, choose California and swipe through its stamps, or import your Google Timeline. Each one goes into your volume with the date, if you know it.
More in the United States
Collect your first stamp.
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