La Jolla, California
(Last updated August 11, 2006)
La Jolla is part of the City of San Diego. It stretches along the coast from Pacific Beach in the south to Torrey Pines State Park in the north. La Jolla is somewhat isolated from Interstate 5 and the rest of San Diego by the Mount Soledad ridge. We have a benign climate, clean air, and some of the feel of a small town; also increasing traffic, high rents and home prices, overdevelopment. Along our shoreline there are rocky headlands separated by coves and uncrowded sand beaches - as shown here. The ocean water is cool to cold most of the year. There are few bugs. We have clouds but little rain. The humidity is not high. The air temperature is almost always in the comfort zone. La Jolla is an internationally known vacation spot. Besides the tourists, we have about 32,000 permanent residents.
La Jolla is well-known for it's surf and prominent role in California surfing history and culture. We boast the famous Windansea Beach and Black's Beach, as well as La Jolla Cove, which offers world-class big-wave surfing on rare occasions. Windansea Beach culture of the 1960's was the subject of Tom Wolfe's novel "The Pumphouse Gang", written in 1968.
La Jolla was first developed in the latter part of the 19th century. At that time many craftsman style homes and vacation cottages were built of redwood. Some of these still exist although many have been moved or demolished to make way for bigger and not so attractive buildings. Consult the La Jolla Historical Society page for more information.
The La Jolla Town Council and La Jolla Community Planning Association deliberate local issues and make recommendations to the San Diego City Council.
La Jolla Shores is part of La Jolla, a little further "up" the coastline from the "village". The La Jolla Shores Association is a local residents group.
La Jolla is the home of Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California San Diego. Both of these large institutions, along with the Salk Institute, Scripps Clinic and many bio tech companies, are in the northeastern part of La Jolla closer to Interstate 5. They do not impact the central La Jolla residential and commercial area as much as one might expect. Actually they ensure that La Jolla has a nice mix of people.
The weather in La Jolla is usually very pleasant, neither too hot nor too cold. Please click on this weather link for more specific information.
The La Jolla Public Library has a new web page with links to other La Jolla sites.
La Jolla has several commercially-oriented pages which do contain some non-commercial information and links:
La Jolla has two local newspapers The La Jolla Village News and The La Jolla Light (web site is out of date)
For peace-related activities and information please click on University of San Diego's Joan Kroc Center for Peace and Justice. There is also the Peace Resource Center, the SD Coalition for Peace and Justice, and the SD Military Counseling Project.
We are open to suggestions for the style and content of this page. We hope that it will eventually become a source for non-commercial information regarding La Jolla. It is our intention to provide links to web pages maintained by civic, cultural and educational organizations. In the future we would like to maintain a calendar of events and meetings.
If you would like to suggest links or other content for this page please contact
