The best-known ruins in California
Ordered by how much has been written about each place. The numbers match the map.
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California's ruins are odd. The Great Stone Church is in the middle of San Juan Capistrano; the St. Francis Dam is 12 km from Castaic; Jack London's Wolf House is 5 km from Agua Caliente; the Rock-A-Hoola Waterpark has no town nearby at all. San Francisco contributes the Warden's House (1934) and Battery Chamberlin (1904), 6 km from the center. The Vallejo Mill Ruins are 4 km from Fremont, and the Fannette Island Tea House sits on Lake Tahoe 10 km from South Lake Tahoe.
RLQuest knows 61 named ruins in California, 13 of them with a Wikipedia article. Against the state's 351 waterfalls it is a short list. A ruin quest in the app works like any other: your recorded route has to reach the spot, and the ground you covered to get there goes onto your map.
Every dot is a place. The numbers mark the highlights listed below.
Ordered by how much has been written about each place. The numbers match the map.
A selection, best known first, with the nearest larger town next to each.
and 9 more
RLQuest knows these places too. Which means:
Some of your daily quests lead to a real place near you. The app uses your location to check you were really there.
If you're the first person in RLQuest to complete a quest at a place, it's your first find. The Place Book shows you which kinds of place you're still missing.
Every walk uncovers tiles, each about 350 m across. Over time you can see which corners you know well, and where you've never set foot.
Place data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. Borders: geoBoundaries (CC BY 4.0); Canada: Statistics Canada. As of 2026-10-02. The list shows the places RLQuest knows and isn't complete. Photos come from Wikimedia Commons; author and license are credited on each photo.
