12 Most Underrated Towns in Southern California
Borrego Springs was California's first International Dark Sky Community, designated from inside Anza-Borrego Desert State Park with the Milky Way still visible from the central traffic circle. Julian still grows the apples it has been growing since the 1870s gold rush gave the town its second crop. Ojai hosts a music festival every June that has been running since 1947 in a sheltered valley behind the coast. Up the coast, Carpinteria works a state beach the Santa Barbara crowds skip over. These twelve underrated towns pull their own visitors for their own reasons. The freeway exits exist for a reason.
Borrego Springs
Borrego Springs sits in the middle of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California's largest state park at roughly 600,000 acres and one of the largest state parks in the country. The town of about 3,500 was designated California's first International Dark Sky Community in 2009, with lighting ordinances strict enough that the Milky Way is visible from the central traffic circle.
The 150-plus life-size steel sculptures Ricardo Breceda built on Dennis Avila's Galleta Meadows land scatter mammoths, sabertooth cats, and a 350-foot serpent across the desert floor north and east of town. Borrego Palm Canyon Trail runs a 3-mile out-and-back to the largest native palm oasis in California. Carlee's Place handles the dinner traffic in the central plaza. In a wet spring, the wildflower bloom across the badlands draws bigger crowds than the rest of the year combined.
Idyllwild
Idyllwild sits at about 5,400 feet in the San Jacinto Mountains, an alpine pocket above the Inland Empire and the desert. The town runs about 3,800 residents year-round and operates as the foothill base for the Pacific Crest Trail through the range and for hikes up Tahquitz Peak and Suicide Rock.
Idyllwild Arts Academy, a boarding school on the south edge of town, runs a public summer festival of music, theater, and visual arts that fills the village with student and visiting-artist performances from late June through August. The Strawberry Creek Inn is the long-running bed-and-breakfast option, and Mile High Cafe handles the breakfast rush. In winter, Mount San Jacinto State Park grooms cross-country trails on the snow.
Big Bear Lake
Big Bear gets the November-through-April attention as the only major ski terrain in Southern California, with Snow Summit and Bear Mountain (jointly operated as Big Bear Mountain Resort) splitting the lift traffic. The underrated season is summer, when the seven-mile alpine reservoir at 6,750 feet in the San Bernardino National Forest trades the snow crowd for a thinner one.
The summer calendar runs on the lake: rental pontoons out of Pleasure Point Marina, the Big Bear Discovery Center on the north shore for the ranger talks, and the Alpine Pedal Path along the water. Big Bear Village handles the dinner-and-shops strip on the south shore. The crowds run thick on weekends but lift off entirely from Monday through Thursday outside school holidays.
Ojai
Ojai sits in a small east-west valley behind the coast in Ventura County, with the Topa Topa Mountains rising to the north. The valley orientation produces the Pink Moment, a 20-minute alpenglow on the Topa Topas at sunset that locals plan dinner around. The Ojai Music Festival, running since 1947, programs four days of contemporary classical music every June with a different artistic director each year.
Bart's Books on Matilija Street, in business since 1964, sells used books from outdoor shelves with an honor box for after-hours purchases. The Ojai Valley Trail follows an old rail bed 9.5 miles down to the coast at Foster Park. Boccali's runs the long-table Italian dinner the locals book months ahead. The Ojai Valley Inn handles the spa-resort end of the market.
Julian
Julian sits at 4,200 feet in the Cuyamaca Mountains, an hour east of San Diego on Highway 78. The town was founded in 1869 as a gold-mining settlement and pivoted to apples by the 1890s when the seams played out. The September-through-October apple harvest is the town's main event, and the Julian Pie Company and Mom's Pie House run the pie economy out of competing storefronts on Main Street.
The Eagle and High Peak Mine on the north edge of town runs underground tours into the 1870s shafts with original equipment. The Julian Pioneer Museum on Washington Street holds the rest of the local history. Volcan Mountain Wilderness Preserve, a few miles north of town, opens the long-view trail toward the Anza-Borrego Desert and the Salton Sea.
Lake Arrowhead
Lake Arrowhead is a private lake at 5,100 feet in the San Bernardinos, ringed by gated communities and accessible to outsiders mostly through Lake Arrowhead Village at the south end. The Village holds a few dozen shops and restaurants on a pedestrian boardwalk above the marina, and the LeRoy Sport Fishing dock runs the public boat tours and rentals.
Heaps Peak Arboretum a few miles west of town handles the easy nature walk under the tall pines. The Lake Arrowhead Resort and Spa, on the lakefront with private beach access, is the standard overnight option for visitors without a cabin invitation. Winter brings snowfall heavy enough most years to need chains on the Rim of the World Highway to get up.
Joshua Tree
The town of Joshua Tree stretches along Twentynine Palms Highway just outside the national park's west entrance and runs a desert-arts scene that has grown loud over the past 20 years. The Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum holds 10 acres of large-scale assemblage sculpture in the open desert north of town, free and open daylight hours.
Joshua Tree National Park itself covers about 800,000 acres at the intersection of the Mojave and Colorado deserts and runs the rock-climbing, boulder-scrambling, and dark-sky stargazing programs that pull most visitors here. In the adjacent town of Pioneertown, Pappy & Harriet's serves barbecue under a wood ceiling and has booked acts from Robert Plant to Lucinda Williams since the 1980s.
Lake Elsinore
Lake Elsinore in Riverside County holds Southern California's largest natural freshwater lake, an oval of about 3,000 acres in a valley between the Santa Ana Mountains and the Temescal Mountains. The town reads suburban now but the lakeshore handles a real water-sport calendar: bass fishing, wakeboarding, jet skis, and small-boat sailing out of the Lake Elsinore Public Boat Launch.
Skydive Elsinore at the south end of town runs tandem jumps over the lake almost every day of the year, weather permitting. The hills above the city run paragliding launches at Walker Canyon. Lake Elsinore Storm baseball games at Storm Stadium handle the summer-evening side of the calendar. The poppy super-bloom on Walker Canyon hillsides every few wet springs draws crowds large enough to shut down the canyon road.
Los Olivos
Los Olivos is a one-stoplight village in the Santa Ynez Valley with more than 25 wine-tasting rooms in its four-block downtown. The town has been collecting wine industry since the 1980s, picked up serious tourist traffic after the 2004 film Sideways, and has not slowed down.
Mattei's Tavern, restored by the Auberge group and reopened in 2023, runs the upscale dinner side and the boutique inn around it. Saarloos & Sons, Tres Hermanas, and Sevtap pour the recognizable wines on Grand Avenue. For a break from the tasting rooms, the lavender fields at Clairmont Farms a mile out of town bloom from June through August and run cuttings for sale on the honor system.
Carpinteria
Carpinteria sits on the coast about 12 miles south of Santa Barbara and runs about 13,000 residents. The town markets Carpinteria State Beach as the "World's Safest Beach," a claim built on a shallow gradient and a natural offshore reef that breaks the swell before it reaches shore. The beach is open year-round with lifeguards in summer.
The Carpinteria Tar Pits at the south end of the state beach show the same fossil-rich asphalt seeps as the La Brea pits in Los Angeles but without the museum and the city traffic. The Carpinteria Bluffs Nature Preserve north of town runs a free trail with a year-round harbor seal rookery viewing area, the only mainland California rookery open to the public. The annual California Avocado Festival every October fills Linden Avenue downtown for three days. Carpinteria is what Santa Barbara was 40 years ago.
Solvang
Solvang was founded in 1911 by a group of Danish-American educators who set up a folk school in the Santa Ynez Valley. The half-timbered facades, thatched roofs, and four working windmills all came later as the town leaned into the heritage in the 1940s and never let go.
Olsen's Danish Village Bakery has been making aebleskiver and kringle since 1970, and Solvang Bakery a few blocks over has been doing the same since 1972. Mission Santa Inés on the east edge of town, founded in 1804 as one of the original 21 California missions, sits a block off the main commercial strip. The Hans Christian Andersen Park on the north end of town has a rose garden and a kids' play structure built as a wooden fairy-tale castle.
Pismo Beach
Pismo Beach sits on the central California coast in San Luis Obispo County, anchored by its 1,200-foot wooden pier and one of the few drive-on beaches left in the state at Oceano Dunes. The Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area covers 5.5 miles of shoreline and the dunes behind it, open to ATVs and four-wheel-drive vehicles by permit.
The Monarch Butterfly Grove on the south edge of town hosts one of the largest overwintering colonies of monarchs in the country from late October through February, with peak counts in November and December. Splash Café on Pomeroy Street has been pouring its clam chowder in sourdough bread bowls since 1991 and runs lines down the block at lunch. The Pismo Beach Pier itself, last rebuilt after the 1983 El Niño storms, handles the casual fishing and the sunset crowd.
The Underrated Twelve
From a dark-sky desert town to a coastal village with a harbor-seal rookery, these twelve towns make the case that the parts of Southern California most worth visiting are rarely the parts on the front of the travel brochure. Skip the parking-lot beach next to the boardwalk and head inland or up the coast instead.
