Things to do in Riverside

Landmark · Downtown, Mission Inn Avenue

A full city block of Mission Revival architecture accumulated between 1876 and 1931 — flying buttresses, a rotunda, spiral staircases, catacombs, a Chinese pagoda and a chapel with a Tiffany window — still operating as a hotel.

Local tip: Walk in and look around; the lobby and courtyards are open. The Festival of Lights from the day after Thanksgiving through early January covers the building in millions of lights and is the city's single biggest annual event — go on a weeknight.

Nature · Immediately west of downtown

A granite hill rising straight out of the city with a paved switchback path to a summit cross and a stone bridge, free and open from dawn, with a view across the whole Inland Empire to the San Gabriels and San Jacintos.

Local tip: Go at sunrise or in the hour before sunset; there is no shade and the granite holds the heat. The Easter sunrise service at the summit has run since 1909 and is the oldest outdoor Easter service in the United States.

Culture · Southern Riverside, Dufferin Avenue

A working demonstration citrus grove preserved as a state park, telling the story of the industry that built this city — and a few miles away, at Magnolia and Arlington, the surviving 1873 Washington navel tree that essentially every California navel orange descends from.

Local tip: Visit the park in winter when the fruit is on the trees and the temperature is bearable. The parent tree itself is an unglamorous fenced corner of a road junction, which is somehow the right way to meet it.

Neighborhood · Central Riverside

A compact downtown of early-twentieth-century civic architecture around a pedestrianised Main Street — the restored Fox Theater, the Riverside Art Museum in a Julia Morgan building, and the Metropolitan Museum in the old post office.

Local tip: The Long Night of Arts and Innovation and the first-Thursday Arts Walk are when downtown is actually busy. Park once in a city garage and walk; everything worth seeing is within four blocks.

Nature · The eastern edge of the UC Riverside campus

Forty acres of hillside gardens on the campus's eastern boundary, running up into the Box Springs Mountains — arid and Mediterranean collections, a rose garden and four miles of trails, with no admission charge.

Local tip: Free and almost always quiet, which is the point. Go early in the morning between November and April; the collections are laid out on a slope and the hillside is punishing after ten in summer.

Food · East and south of downtown

Riverside's oldest Mexican-American neighbourhoods, settled by citrus workers and still the centre of the city's food — birria, carnitas, mariscos and bakeries that have been in the same families for generations.

Local tip: Casa Blanca and the Eastside are where locals eat rather than where visitors are sent. Go at weekends for birria in the morning, and treat the taco trucks on University and Magnolia as a serious option rather than a fallback.