Things to Do in Long Beach, California

The Aquarium of the Pacific

The Aquarium of the Pacific is Southern California's largest aquarium, home to playful sea otters, Magellanic penguins, and a 350,000-gallon tropical reef habitat holding thousands of colorful fish, coral, sea turtles, and sharks, with a Shark Lagoon touch area where visitors can interact directly with some species. It's open daily except Christmas Day and closes for one weekend each April during the Grand Prix, when nearby street closures affect access -- worth knowing if planning a spring visit around that specific event.

The aquarium's downtown-waterfront location makes it a genuinely walkable stop for anyone staying near the harbor or the Queen Mary, and its scale -- a full-sized, accredited aquarium rather than a small local attraction -- reflects Long Beach's status as a real, major California city rather than a small coastal town with a modest visitor-center-style attraction.

The Queen Mary

The historic RMS Queen Mary, permanently docked at the Port of Long Beach's edge, remains a real, if genuinely still-evolving, visitor attraction -- the ship reopened to guests in stages after the City of Long Beach regained full control in June 2021 (a limited reopening in December 2022, a broader one in June 2023), with more than 118,000 guests visiting since October 2023. A new $16.5 million temporary amphitheater, the Long Beach Bowl, is planned adjacent to the ship for the 2026 concert season, part of a broader study of redeveloping the surrounding 43 acres. See the What Nobody Tells You page for the fuller, more complicated history behind this attraction's current state.

Visiting the Queen Mary today means engaging with a real piece of maritime and Long Beach civic history, not a fully polished, finished museum experience -- tours, historic staterooms, and dining venues aboard the ship coexist with an ongoing, publicly documented repair and redevelopment process, a genuinely different visitor experience than a static historic-house museum.

Naples Canals and Gondola Rides

The Naples canals, built in the early 1900s as developer Arthur Parson's vision of an Italian-style resort village, remain a genuinely distinctive Long Beach attraction, with Gondola Getaway offering traditional Venetian-style gondola rides through the canal system's four bridges -- a real, sourced experience unlike anything else on this site's Southern California markets. Beyond the guided gondola experience, the canals themselves are a popular self-guided walking destination, with visitors and residents alike strolling the canal-front sidewalks to see the neighborhood's distinctive architecture and the small footbridges connecting the island's three sections.

2nd Street and Belmont Shore

Belmont Shore's 2nd Street corridor -- 15 blocks of shops, restaurants, and nightlife -- combines with nearby Alamitos Beach and the Belmont Veterans Memorial Pier for soft-sand beach access, swimming, and a wide promenade well-suited to walking and people-watching, with the pier itself extending into open water for an elevated view, fishing, or simply watching the horizon. The corridor's evening scene ranges from casual, beer-focused bars to more upscale cocktail spots, giving it a genuinely broad appeal across different visitor and resident preferences rather than a single narrow nightlife identity.

The Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach

Each spring (2026 dates were April 17-19), the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach runs a major street race through closed-off downtown streets, drawing significant regional visitor traffic and energy to the city -- a genuinely major annual event, described elsewhere on this site's sourcing as Long Beach's largest annual event, ahead even of the city's large Pride Parade. For anyone specifically interested in motorsports, it's a rare opportunity to see professional street racing up close in an American downtown setting, a genuinely uncommon format compared to purpose-built racetrack venues.

Beyond the Headline Attractions: A Genuinely Broad City

The attractions covered above -- the Aquarium of the Pacific, the Queen Mary, the Naples canals, 2nd Street, and the Grand Prix -- are Long Beach's best-known, most heavily documented draws, but they represent only a portion of what a genuinely large California city of roughly 450,000-455,000 residents actually offers. The city's own park system, its broader arts and cultural institutions in the East Village Arts District, and its status as home to the largest Cambodian community outside Cambodia all add real, additional dimensions to what there is to see and do here, beyond the specifically waterfront-oriented list above. See the Community & Lifestyle page for more on Cambodia Town and the Broadway Corridor's LGBTQ+ Cultural District specifically.

This page does not have a confirmed, comprehensive inventory of Long Beach's full park system, arts venues, or cultural institutions beyond what's specifically covered elsewhere on this site, and recommends checking the City of Long Beach's and Visit Long Beach's own current listings for a fuller picture beyond this page's necessarily selective, sourced highlights.

What This Page Does Not Know

This page does not have a confirmed, comprehensive current list of every Long Beach attraction, confirmed current admission pricing for the Aquarium of the Pacific or the Queen Mary, or a confirmed comparative visitor-volume ranking across these attractions.

For current hours, pricing, and event schedules, check the Aquarium of the Pacific's, the Queen Mary's, and the City of Long Beach's own current listings directly.