Here recorded California history begins, where you look out over the bay Cabrillo entered in 1542. On September 28, 1542, Portuguese explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed his flagship San Salvador into the bay below you and went ashore near what is now Old Town — the first European to set foot on the West Coast of North America north of Mexico. Cabrillo was sailing for the Spanish Crown, looking for a rumored strait connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic and for wealthy cities to plunder.
He found neither. What he found was a coast of extraordinary natural richness, inhabited by the Kumeyaay people who had been here for thousands of years, with a bay he noted as very good. Cabrillo died in early 1543 on the Channel Islands, likely from a fall, and his expedition returned to Mexico without establishing a permanent settlement.
European colonization of Alta California would wait another 227 years. The monument's statue of Cabrillo, sculpted in Portugal and installed here in 1988, gazes out over the bay he entered nearly five centuries ago. From this cliff top, you have arguably the finest single vantage point in San Diego: the entire bay spread below, the city in the distance, the Pacific to the west, and on winter days, gray whales migrating south along the kelp line.