Coronado Shores, Coronado, CA

Ten fifteen-story towers stand in a row on the sand south of the Hotel del, and that single complex is Coronado Shores. It is the one part of Coronado where people live in high-rises, with Avenida del Mundo running behind the buildings and Glorietta Bay just across the highway. Before any towers, this strip held Tent City, a seaside spread of hundreds of tents that filled with vacationers every summer, and rail tracks once crossed it. The first building, the Cabrillo, broke ground in 1970, and the tenth was finished in 1978. Every home is a condominium. The selling point is the window, which takes in some mix of the Pacific, the bay, Point Loma and the downtown skyline depending on the side, and a long boulder seawall guards the boardwalk in front. The beach below the towers is the same wide Coronado sand that runs north past the hotel. On the bay side, Glorietta Bay Park has lawns, picnic tables, fire pits and a small-boat launch, and the city's Aquatics Center next door runs the public pool. The Bayshore Bikeway heads south from here down the Strand toward Imperial Beach. There is little to eat inside the complex, so Shores residents walk. Bluewater Boathouse Seafood Grill sits on Glorietta Bay in a cupola-topped building from 1887 that served as a design model for the hotel across the street, and it keeps things simple with seafood plates and a happy hour on the water. Coffee shops and casual places line Orange Avenue farther into the village. Vons, up Orange Avenue, handles groceries and is an easy bike ride. Leaving the island means either the bridge to San Diego or the drive down Silver Strand Boulevard to Imperial Beach and Interstate 5, and a ferry crosses to downtown from the landing on the bay side. Tower life comes with elevators, shared walls and a lobby in place of a yard, and on summer weekends the sand out front fills with hotel guests and day visitors. From the upper floors of Coronado Shores, the sun drops into the ocean on one side while the city lights come up across the bay on the other.