The La Jolla Sea CavesWhat the tunnel costs, and which cave a kayak may actually enter

Seven sea caves are eroded into the sandstone cliff between La Jolla Cove and Goldfish Point. Exactly one of them, Sunny Jim's Sea Cave, has a land entrance: a tunnel hand-dug from 1902 behind what is now The Cave Store, with 145 steps down to a viewing platform, $13 for adults, cash or card at the door only. The other six are reachable only from the water, and the widespread promise of 'kayaking into the caves' comes down in practice to a single cave, Clam's Cave, on days when the swell allows and only with a guide certified for cave entry.

The sites compared

Tickets and prices

There is no advance sale of any kind for Sunny Jim's Sea Cave. The operator's wording is blunt: tickets at the door only, no advance purchases, no reservations necessary or available. Kayak tours are the opposite case - they are booked online, and summer mornings do sell out.

Official prices

• Sunny Jim's Sea Cave, adults$13 (about 11 EUR)
• Sunny Jim's Sea Cave, youth aged 3-17$7 (about 6 EUR)
• Sunny Jim's Sea Cave, seniors and active military$8 (about 7 EUR) - reported by lajollamom.com, not listed on the operator's own price line
• Sea cave kayak tour, Bike & Kayak Tours, 2 hoursfrom $59 to $64 per kayak (about 51-56 EUR), single, double or triple
• Sea cave kayak tour, Everyday California, 90 minutesfrom $89 per single kayak, $109 per double (about 78 / 95 EUR)
• Kayak and snorkel tour, Everyday California, 2 hoursfrom $124 per single, $159 per double (about 108 / 139 EUR)
• Wetsuit hire, La Jolla Sea Cave Kayaks$15 (about 13 EUR)
• Locker hire, Everyday California$6 (about 5 EUR)
• MTS bus, single ride$2.50 (about 2.20 EUR), daily cap $6 (about 5 EUR)
• La Jolla Cove, Scripps Park, Coast Boulevard, the seawall and all views of the caves from shorefree

As of 09/2026 · source and direct booking: cavestore.com

When everything is sold out

The cave cannot sell out, but it can queue. Because only 15 to 20 people are let down at a time and the round trip takes about 20 minutes, a busy afternoon means waiting in the shop.

Kayak and snorkel tours to the caves - and the one ticket you cannot book here

Two different things are being sold in La Jolla and it is worth keeping them apart. The walk down the tunnel into Sunny Jim's Sea Cave is bought at the counter inside The Cave Store for $13 adult and $7 youth, cash or card, first come first served; the operator says plainly that tickets are available at the door only and that it is not affiliated with any third-party ticketing service, so any listing that looks like cave admission is not the operator's ticket. What GetYourGuide is genuinely good for is the water: around 1,470 reviews sit on the kayak and snorkel tours here, which is the part of the day you cannot arrange yourself. That is not a convenience - it is a rule. Entering a sea cave is forbidden to the general public, rental kayaks are barred from the caves by order of the San Diego Lifeguards, and only a guide certified for cave entry may take guests inside, everyone in a helmet. Expect roughly $59 to $64 per kayak with Bike & Kayak Tours for two hours, from $89 for a single and $109 for a double with Everyday California for 90 minutes, and from about $79 for a two-person kayak on GetYourGuide - prices are per kayak, so a double splits to around $30 to $40 a head. Book the first slot of the day: the cave that tours actually enter is Clam's Cave, entry depends on swell and wind, and the wind gets up by midday. If the sea is against you the tour still runs along the cliffs without going in, so check the operator's conditions policy before you pay. Do both on the same morning and the whole thing costs about $45 a person - the tunnel from the inside, the cliff from the water.

Booked through GetYourGuide (affiliate link, advertising). Most offers can be cancelled free of charge up to 24 hours ahead. Prices as of 20 September 2026.

Opening hours and best time

Sunny Jim's Sea Cave: tours run every day from 9.00 to 16.30, and the shop itself stays open until 17.00. There is no winter season and no weekly closing day published. Entry is first come, first served and the cave holds 15 to 20 people at a time, so on summer afternoons and at weekends there is often a queue in the shop. Kayak tours from La Jolla Shores run all year, daily, from 9.00 until roughly two hours before sunset, weather permitting; the last departure is around 17.00 in high summer and much earlier in winter.

When it is quietest

A weekday morning, for two separate reasons. The cave is quietest before the coach and school traffic arrives, and the sea is calmest before the north-westerly wind gets up around midday - which is precisely what decides whether a kayak tour gets inside Clam's Cave at all. For the water, late summer and early autumn: sea temperature at La Jolla Cove peaks at 19-22 C (66-72 F) in the first week of September, visibility from the Cove can exceed 30 ft (9 m), and the leopard sharks are in the shallows. Winter is the swell season, when cave entry is least likely and the water drops to 13-16 C (55-61 F). If you want the seals and pups at Children's Pool, come between mid-December and mid-May - but from the seawall, because the beach is shut.

Who it suits

Getting there

By public transport

MTS bus route 30 runs from Old Town Transit Center through Pacific Beach to the village of La Jolla and on to UTC; the stop for the caves is in the village, a short downhill walk along Prospect Street to Coast Boulevard. From downtown San Diego take the Trolley or a bus to Old Town first and change. A single ride is $2.50 and the PRONTO daily cap is $6, so a return trip costs no more than a day's cap. Allow well over an hour each way from downtown.

By car

La Jolla has no parking meters, which sounds better than it is: the village runs on time-limited free kerbside bays, from 30 minutes to three hours, enforced hard during the day and generally free of limits after 18.00. The Cave Store's own advice is to try the residential and business streets between Torrey Pines Road and Prospect Street - Ivanhoe, Silverado and Cave Street - before trying Prospect Street or Coast Boulevard, and to budget a quarter of an hour for the hunt at weekends and in school holidays. There is a small lot outside the shop that fills early, a paid Ace lot across the road, and restaurant valet on Prospect Street within five minutes' walk. Coast Boulevard itself has three-hour bays.

From the nearest city

About 20 km north of downtown San Diego, 30 to 40 minutes by car without traffic. San Diego International Airport is about 19 km away. Kayak tours do not start here: they start at La Jolla Shores, around 2158-2199 Avenida de la Playa, roughly 2 km from the Cave Store by road, with its own difficult parking - operators ask you to arrive 45 minutes before departure.

Tips for your visit

1. Bring a card or cash and go straight to the counter inside The Cave Store - there is nothing to book, nothing to print and nobody to email. If the queue is long, walk the Coast Boulevard path for twenty minutes and come back.
2. Closed shoes with grip, both hands free. The wooden steps are wet, muddy and genuinely slippery, and the handrail is the point. Leave the bag and the pushchair upstairs.
3. Look left of the shop as you face the sea: Clam's Cave is right there, the only one of the seven visible from land, and it costs nothing to look at.
4. Book the kayak tour for the first slot of the day. Cave entry depends on swell and wind, and the wind reliably gets up around midday - a 9am departure has the best chance of actually going inside.
5. Ask the kayak operator before you pay what happens if the sea is too rough. All of them reserve the right to skip the cave and paddle the cliffs instead; policies on rescheduling and refunds differ and are worth reading rather than assuming.
6. Fifty yards, roughly 46 metres, is the federal rule of thumb for seals and sea lions - on land as much as in the water. At the Cove that means not walking down among them for a photograph, however many other people are doing it.
7. Point La Jolla and Boomer Beach are closed all year, not seasonally, and the closure is enforced under the municipal code. The clifftop path above them stays open and gives a better view anyway.
8. Children's Pool is shut to the beach from 15 December to 15 May for harbour seal pupping. The seawall and the pavement stay open the whole time, and that is where you watch from.
9. Take nothing out of the water - no shells, no rocks, no lobster, no fishing. The inner zone is a state marine reserve where taking any living, geological or cultural resource is an offence.
10. Parking: try Ivanhoe, Silverado or Cave Street first, allow fifteen minutes, and check the sign on the pole. La Jolla has no meters but it does have 30-minute to three-hour bays and enforcement that notices.

What the internet gets wrong

History in brief

• The cliff is sandstone laid down in the Cretaceous, and the seven caves were cut into it by water working along fractures. No excavation was needed to make the caves - only to reach one of them dry-shod.
• In November 1902 Thomas Diamond, who owned property on Cave Street, asked San Diego's Common Council for permission to drive a tunnel into the caves and charge admission. Within a week his neighbours filed a counter-petition arguing the tunnels would endanger the street and shorten the life of the caves. Ellen Browning Scripps signed against him. The council refused.
• Gustav Schultz - a German artist, photographer and mining engineer who styled himself professor - simply did it from his own land at the north end of Cave Street. He hired two Chinese labourers, who dug the shaft out with picks and shovels. Work began in November 1902 and ran into 1903; some accounts stretch it to two years.
• The neighbourhood quarrel turned physical. On 18 December 1902 the San Diego Union reported 'a little difficulty' between Diamond and Schultz that ended with Diamond arrested for battery. The paper never explained what started it.
• La Jolla changed its mind fast. By September 1903 residents were petitioning in Schultz's favour, on the grounds that his tunnel made the cave safely and easily reachable and had become one of the town's principal attractions.
• The first visitors went down on a rope. Wooden stairs came later, and there have been 144 or 145 of them ever since, depending on which paragraph of the operator's website you read. The Cave Store dates its tours from 1905.
• The name is attributed to L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, who is said to have thought the cave mouth looked like Sunny Jim, the mascot on boxes of Force wheat flakes. Local sources hedge this with 'supposedly' and note that other explanations circulate; no contemporary document is produced for it.
• Prohibition-era smuggling of whiskey, opium and people through the tunnel is the story every source repeats and none evidences. The operator itself writes 'it's been said that'; a cave-documentation site calls it unverified legend. Treat it as folklore that happens to be excellent folklore.
• A cafe stood by the cave in the early 1900s and burned down in 1915. Jim Allen bought the business in 1994, when it was mostly a seashell shop; today the great bulk of its revenue is cave admission. The Cave Store and Schultz's tunnel became San Diego Historic Landmark 380 on 28 April 1999.
• The sea outside the caves was protected long before the sea lions became a political question: the City created the San Diego-La Jolla Underwater Park in 1970, and in 2012 the state redrew the inner zone as the no-take Matlahuayl State Marine Reserve. Point La Jolla, the sea lion haul-out beside the Cove, went from an emergency summer closure in 2021 to a permitted seasonal closure in 2022 to a year-round closure in September 2023.

Frequent questions

Sources