Oceanside

Oceanside is a beach city in northern San Diego County, California, on the Pacific coast at the mouth of the San Luis Rey River. Its long wooden pier and wide sand beaches have made it a surfing town since the early 20th century.

Father Fermín Lasuén founded Mission San Luis Rey de Francia in the river valley in 1798, and it became known as the King of the Missions. After secularization in the 1830s the mission lands passed into ranchos. The California Southern Railroad reached the coast in the 1880s, and the beach town was incorporated in 1888. Andrew Jackson Myers, who held a homestead claim near the river mouth, laid out its first lots and is counted as its founder. Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base on the old Rancho Santa Margarita, opened on its northern border in the 1940s and brought new families.

Mission San Luis Rey, rebuilt in adobe and white plaster, keeps its church, a cemetery and the ruins of its laundry pools. The Oceanside Pier reaches far out over the surf from the end of Pier View Way. The California Surf Museum displays surfboards from the early wooden planks to modern foam boards, along with photographs of surfing pioneers. The Oceanside Museum of Art uses the former city hall designed by the architect Irving Gill in the 1930s. Oceanside Harbor holds a small fishing fleet and sailboats behind its breakwater.

Genentech runs a plant in Oceanside that makes biologic medicines in large steel bioreactors. Hydranautics, a Nitto Denko company, makes reverse osmosis membranes for water desalination in the city. Avocado and flower farms in the hills of the San Luis Rey Valley supply markets across Southern California.