Chula Vista Map
Chula Vista fills the land between San Diego Bay and the hills east of it, roughly halfway from downtown San Diego to the busiest land border crossing in the country.
Where is Chula Vista?
Chula Vista is in the southwestern corner of California, about 8 miles south of downtown San Diego and some 10 miles north of the international border at San Ysidro, where the crossing into Tijuana is the busiest on the US–Mexico line. Los Angeles is roughly 125 miles up the coast to the northwest, and Riverside about 95 miles north. The city runs inland from the bay, climbing gradually onto the mesas as it goes east.
Chula Vista at a glance
| State | California |
| County | San Diego County |
| Population | 278,546 (2024 Census estimate) |
| Rank among US cities | No. 81 of the 100 largest |
| Time zone | Pacific Time |
| Region | West (Pacific division) |
Chula Vista in California
Chula Vista is the second-largest city in San Diego County after San Diego itself, with only National City between them — the California county map puts all three inside one of the state's most populous counties. The city grew in two clearly separate stages: a bayfront town of citrus groves that turned industrial when Rohr Aircraft opened here in 1940, and then, from the 1980s, a run of master-planned villages — EastLake, Otay Ranch — laid out on the empty mesas east of Interstate 805, which is where nearly all the recent growth has gone. The Chula Vista Elite Athlete Training Center, in the hills above Lower Otay Reservoir, is one of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee's training sites. The city keeps Pacific Time with the rest of the state; the California state page has the wider picture.
South San Diego Bay and the Sweetwater
The western edge of the city is salt marsh and mudflat at the shallow southern end of San Diego Bay, protected as the Sweetwater Marsh unit of the San Diego Bay National Wildlife Refuge — one of the last large stretches of coastal wetland left on this part of the Pacific coast. The Sweetwater River crosses the city from the east and is dammed upstream into Sweetwater Reservoir; the Otay lakes sit further southeast in the foothills. Ground rises steadily inland from sea level at the bay to the mesa neighborhoods several hundred feet up, and the low Otay Mountain ridge closes the view east toward the border highlands.
Cities near Chula Vista
Nearby are San Diego, Santa Ana, Anaheim, Long Beach and Irvine. For where all of them sit on the national map, open the US map with cities.