Mount Soledad Memorial Park

This guide to Mount Soledad Memorial Park in San Diego follows a hilltop cross through three attempts: a wooden frame stolen and burned in the 1920s, a stucco version torn apart by windstorms in 1952, and architect Donald Campbell's prestressed concrete replacement engineered in 1954 to finally outlast the weather. It traces the decades of Easter sunrise services that gave the hill its old nickname, and the church-and-state legal fight that followed once the cross became a national landmark. The guide also brings you to the black granite walls that now ring the memorial. Take in the three-hundred-sixty-degree coastal view from the highest point on the San Diego shoreline.