Reclaimed tidelands stretch beneath your feet here, shaping San Diego's downtown waterfront promenade since the 1850s. San Diego Bay is one of the finest natural harbors on the Pacific Coast — deep, sheltered from storms, and positioned at the edge of a continent — which is why the Spanish chose it, why the US Navy stayed, and why the waterfront has been commercially active since the 1850s. For much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this harbor bustled with Chinese shrimp fishermen, who operated some of the most productive shrimping operations in California from floating processing camps just off these shores, and with Italian tuna fishermen whose vessels worked the Pacific from here to the Channel Islands.
Racial exclusion laws eventually dismantled the Chinese fishing industry; the Italian tuna fleet eventually moved to canneries. Today the Embarcadero is a mix of ferry terminals, waterfront parks, restaurant piers, and the Navy's working piers just to the south. The bay itself is cleaner than it has been in a century, the result of decades of environmental remediation after the wartime shipbuilding industry left a legacy of contaminated sediment.