Top Things to Do in Palo Alto
14 must-see attractions and experiences
Palo Alto sits where the intellectual and the pastoral collide without apology. Stanford University's sandstone quads and red-tile roofs anchor the western edge, filling weekday mornings with bicycle bells and the clean, resinous smell of eucalyptus trees lining the inner campus roads. East of El Camino Real, the mood shifts to leafy residential blocks and a downtown that moves at the speed of a considered conversation: independent bookstores, serious restaurants, and a main street that has resisted the homogenization that erased character in most American commercial corridors. First-time visitors expect glass office buildings and instead find excellent art museums, immaculate botanical gardens, and a network of open-space preserves that climb into the Santa Cruz Mountains with views stretching clear across the Bay. The weather follows a reliable, generous rhythm: warm, dry summers from late May through October, when the surrounding hills turn golden and the sky holds a deep, saturated blue from dawn until dark; a short, mild winter when the hills go green and rain falls in soft, steady sheets. And two shoulder seasons, spring and fall, that longtime Peninsula residents will tell you are the finest weeks to be alive in Northern California. The city is safe and straightforward to navigate on foot or bicycle, and the free Marguerite shuttle covers the Stanford campus comprehensively for visitors who prefer not to walk. University Avenue is the main spine of downtown, lined with restaurants that range from quick Vietnamese pho shops where the broth smells of star anise and bone marrow to farm-to-table kitchens that have been earning quiet national attention for a decade. What sets Palo Alto apart from its Silicon Valley neighbors is the sheer density of excellent free things. The art collections alone, spread across the Cantor Arts Center, the Rodin Sculpture Garden, and the Anderson Collection, would justify a long weekend trip from most American cities. Layer in the tidal wetlands at Baylands, the peculiar grandeur of Pulgas Water Temple, and the walking trails that wind through the golden hills above the Stanford Dish, and two full days here leave you with the productive dissatisfaction of having found more than you came for. Palo Alto is also a natural hub for day trips into Mountain View and Menlo Park. Return each evening to one of the most architecturally coherent and walkable small downtowns in the state.
Hand-Picked Experiences in Palo Alto
The best of every kind, whatever you're in the mood for
Day Trips Further Afield
From San Francisco: Private Tour to Silicon Valley
Discover Silicon Valley on a private guided tour to Check out campuses and see a house and Garage.
Insider tip This is a private guided tour. The itinerary can be personalized to your interests.
More to Explore
Even more of the best of Palo Alto
Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University
Museums & GalleriesTucked behind the sandstone arches of Stanford's main quad, the Cantor Arts Center holds one of the most eclectic permanent collections in the American West, with works spanning ancient Greek pottery, medieval European altarpieces, and a photography archive that documents the Bay Area's twentieth century with an intimacy that can stop you cold. Afternoon light falls through clerestory windows into the central galleries, and the courtyard outside smells of warm stone and cut grass drifting from the nearby grounds. The collection moves between continents and centuries with enough curatorial coherence that the transitions feel deliberate rather than random, and the scale of the building rewards slow, repeated visiting rather than a single complete sweep.
Magical Bridge Playground
Cultural ExperiencesMagical Bridge Playground in Palo Alto's Mitchell Park is unlike almost any other public playground in the United States: it was engineered from the ground up to be fully accessible to children and adults with physical and cognitive disabilities. Yet it is so beautifully designed, with swooping ramp structures, musical percussion instruments embedded in the ground, and soft rubber surfacing underfoot, that it draws families with and without disabled members in roughly equal numbers. The sound on a busy morning is layered and joyful: laughter mixing with the metallic chime of the percussion panels, the squeak of rubber soles, and the hum of the park beyond.
Windy Hill Open Space Preserve
Natural WondersFrom the grassy summit ridgeline at Windy Hill Open Space Preserve, the view sweeps south over rolling oak woodland and north across the full expanse of the Bay, from the salt marshes of the East Bay to the pale smear of San Francisco twenty miles distant. The wind at the top is persistent and cool even in August, carrying the dry smell of summer grass and sage, and the trails down through the mixed woodland below pass through patches of shade so deep and still they feel detached from the exposed hillside above. This is the preserve for walkers who want both a genuine physical challenge and a summit reward that earns it: the panoramic views from the Spring Ridge Trail count among the best accessible from anywhere on the South Bay peninsula.
Pulgas Water Temple
Historic SitesPulgas Water Temple sits at the end of a gravel path through a cypress grove on the Peninsula's eastern slope, and it is one of the most unexpectedly beautiful pieces of civic infrastructure in California. Built in 1934 to celebrate the arrival of Hetch Hetchy water from the Sierra Nevada, it takes the form of a Greco-Roman colonnade surrounding a circular reflecting pool, and the sound of water rushing into that pool from the aqueduct below fills the enclosed space with a deep, resonant roar that echoes under the stone canopy and vibrates faintly in the soles of your feet. The smell of damp stone and standing water mingles with the dry resin of the surrounding cypress trees, and the dissonance of monumental architecture in a suburban canyon setting is the kind of thing that stays with you for years.
Elizabeth F. Gamble Garden
Natural WondersElizabeth F. Gamble Garden occupies a historic Craftsman property on Waverley Street in central Palo Alto and operates as a working demonstration garden, horticultural education center, and quiet retreat simultaneously. The wisteria arbor in late April and early May fills the air with a fragrance so heavy and sweet it can be detected half a block away on a still morning, and the structured rose garden at its peak in May and early June holds hundreds of cultivars in colors ranging from cream and blush to near-crimson and deep burgundy. What distinguishes this garden from a municipal park is the intention visible in every planting decision: the gradations between formal English garden sections and the more naturalistic native California plant areas are slow and thoughtful, never abrupt.
Rodin Sculpture Garden
Museums & GalleriesThe Rodin Sculpture Garden at Stanford is an outdoor installation of cast bronzes set against a backdrop of sandstone loggias, and it holds one of the largest collections of Rodin's work outside of Paris. "The Gates of Hell," the monumental portal cast from Rodin's unfinished masterwork, dominates the central space, its surface dense with writhing figures that seem to shift as the light moves across them through the California afternoon. The garden is open continuously and free of charge, which means you can arrive at dusk when the low western light strikes the bronze at an oblique angle and turns the deep-relief shadows nearly black against the warm, greenish metal surface.
Pearson-Arastradero Preserve
Natural WondersPearson-Arastradero Preserve is the largest open-space preserve within Palo Alto's city limits, covering rolling grassland, oak woodland, and a small seasonal pond that attracts egrets, red-tailed hawks, and white-tailed kites in numbers that consistently surprise first-time visitors from the urban core. The trails are wide and well-graded enough for mountain bikes. But the grassland sections on a still weekday morning carry a quiet so complete that the sound of footsteps on dry straw-colored grass is the dominant note in the soundscape. Wild fennel lines the lower trails with a sharp, anise-sweet smell, and in late spring the hillside above Arastradero Lake turns briefly and intensely green before the summer heat burns it to gold.
Redwood Grove Nature Preserve
Natural WondersRedwood Grove Nature Preserve, accessible from Palo Alto's southern edge in the neighboring city of Los Altos, is a small but atmospherically striking stand of coastal redwoods planted around a seasonal creek, and the quality of light inside the grove at midday falls in narrow, nearly vertical shafts through a canopy so dense it reduces the ambient sound of the surrounding neighborhoods to near-zero. The air is noticeably cooler and damper than outside the grove, on warm Peninsula afternoons the temperature difference is immediate and physical, and the ground underfoot has the particular spongy give of decades of accumulated needle duff. This is a brief visit but a memorable one, a fragment of ancient-feeling forest tucked improbably into the suburban South Bay.
Hoover Tower
Historic SitesHoover Tower rises 285 feet above the Stanford campus as both a research archive and an observation platform, and from its upper deck on a clear winter morning, the Bay Area resolves into a geographic picture that no map quite replicates: the salt evaporation ponds at the Bay's southern end glow in geometric blocks of rust-red and pale pink, the Peninsula's foothills roll in parallel ridges toward the south, and on the clearest days in February and March the white crests of the Sierra Nevada are faintly visible 150 miles to the east. The base of the tower is free to enter and houses rotating exhibits drawn from the Hoover Institution's archives of twentieth-century political documents.
Arizona Garden
Natural WondersThe Arizona Garden at Stanford is one of the most densely planted cactus and succulent gardens in Northern California, a corner of campus that feels like a transplanted fragment of the Sonoran Desert pressed into the Mediterranean-climate landscape of the Peninsula. The space is organized loosely rather than formally, which means tall saguaros and organ pipe cacti loom unexpectedly around corners, and the texture underfoot shifts from gravel to bare earth to decomposed granite. On warm afternoons the air above the garden carries a dry, mineral quality completely unlike the surrounding campus, and the contrast between the spined, architectural silhouettes of the desert plants and the red-tile roofs of the nearby Stanford buildings is quietly disorienting.
Planning Your Visit
Practical tips for getting the most out of Palo Alto
Explore more experiences in Palo Alto
Browse live availability and pricing.
Didn't see anything interesting yet?
Browse Viator's full catalog of tours, day trips, food experiences, and private guides in Palo Alto.
See All Palo Alto Tours on Viator