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"We apologise if you are inconvenienced by the solicitors outside the gate. The Zoo does not endorse their activity," warns a sign displayed at the exit of San Diego Zoo.

Few British visitors fail to laugh at the sign, and many snap photographs. This, however, is no Californian "lawyer joke"; the sign's politically correct term, "solicitors", refers to the beggars milling outside the gate. The locals, soliciting or otherwise, probably consider that the tourists guffawing at the sign are in need of some, like, political correction.

San Diego, California's southernmost city, is the gateway to Mexico or - if you're on the other side - to the Promised Land. Like all frontier towns it has its share of both rags and riches, as the zoo gate demonstrates.

Should the California dream beckon to you, yet the prospect of Los Angeles seem like a nightmare, consider San Diego. Two hundred freeway kilometres south of LA, San Diego (population one million) still has all the bustle of a major city, without LA's horizon-to-horizon humanity (and sporadic inhumanity).

In 1848 the last Spanish Governor of California fled to Mexico. (He swapped beautiful Santa Catalina Island for a fresh horse and a silver saddle; the land deed was drafted on a piece of butcher's paper.) Long before this humiliation, the Spanish had built a string of missions up the California coast from San Diego, threading them like a rosary along the road still known as El Camino Real, the Royal Highway.

San Diego's Old Town, one of the remnants of this glory, dates back to the founding of the Mission San Diego de Alcala in 1769. Old Town's upmarket restaurants, like Casa de Bandini (in an 1829 adobe mansion), will expand your waistline historically with fare that is well beyond the usual "three Ts" of Mexican dining - tamales, tostados and tacos. Margaritas by the jug, flamenco dancers and mariachi musicians in the park add to the experience.

San Diego Zoo, with 404 hectares and over 4000 creatures, is one of the most famous zoos in the world. Commentary bus tours run through it and there's a Skyfari chair lift that offers you aerial views of the menagerie. But the best show is, as ever, the behaviour of the children at the "Kids Zoo". There's also an excellent Wild Animal Park just north of San Diego (on Highway 15) at Escondido, specialising in African animals.

Not far from the Zoo, Balboa Park had, at last count, some16 museums and galleries that celebrate automobiles, aerospace, visual arts and natural history. Much of this is housed in ornate, pseudo-Hispanic architecture, surrounded by leafy parks and ponds.

For 30 years, Sea World (at Mission Bay) has been almost as famous as the San Diego Zoo. Its 55 hectares house aquariums of exotic fish, a seal show, penguins and dolphins; don't miss the orcas (killer whales) and energetic little sea otters. Serious students of the deep should also visit the Stephen Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

San Diego has one of the best natural harbours on the West Coast and is home to the US Navy's Third Fleet. Join a cruise and be awestruck by the battleships and destroyers bristling with guns and radar; above you loom aircraft carriers flight decks as high as an office block.

If you recognise an elaborate, white, wooden hotel perched on the seafront at Coronado that seems to bloom with towers and shingled roofs, you're right. It's the Hotel Del Coronado, built in the1880s, and made famous in movies such as Some Like It Hot and The Stunt Man.

To the north of San Diego is a string of seaside suburbs and wealthy enclaves, like La Jolla, inhabited by so-called "snowbirds", silver-haired retirees. In honour of their kind, they have built facilities with names like the John Wayne Airport, Jimmy Durante Drive and the Lawrence Welk Resort. La Jolla (pronounced "La Hoya") is an oasis of privilege, crowned by a giant Mormon temple that looks like a cathedral cake by Sarah Lee. At Aviara, the Four Seasons Resort claims it has "the Mercedes-Benz of golf courses"; you can test this assertion against 69 other courses in the San Diego area.

When accommodation is tight in San Diego, try Carlsbad (45 minutes to the north). With glassy surf and easygoing people, it's good for a beach holiday, as well as allowing access to both San Diego and Los Angeles (1 hr 45 minutes away). As well, Carlsbad has a ghost.

The "Schutte Ghost House," a wooden, three-storey building, just back from the beach, was once a guest house. It still looks like a relative of the Bates Motel from Psycho, even though fresh paint and a neon sign announce it as "Niemans Restaurant." The ghost stories go back to 1919, when the Kentner family purchased the mansion from the Schutte family. In 1986 a psychic reported that the main "shade" was a crotchety Australian janitor called Billy, who had worked for the Kentners for many years. His ghost is supposed to hang around the bar area.

No one knows who Grumpy Billy the Aussie was, how he died, or why he turned this from a guest-house to a ghost-house. Kevin Perkins, who worked in the building for 17 years, recalled that his co-workers would often feel that someone was, "tickling the backs of their necks." Perhaps old Billy was just trying to bite them for a drink.

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