Balboa Park Once Had a Nudist Colony

Balboa Park Once Had a Nudist Colony | San Diego Weird History

SAN DIEGO Weird History

Balboa Park Once Had a Nudist Colony — Seriously

Today, Balboa Park is known for museums, gardens, Spanish Colonial Revival architecture, the San Diego Zoo and family outings.

But in 1935, visitors could also pay admission to peer into an attraction promoted as a nudist colony.

It was called Zoro Garden, and it was part of the California Pacific International Exposition — a massive world's-fair-style event designed to attract visitors to San Diego during the Great Depression.

And somehow, a group of scantily clad performers reading books, playing games and lounging in a sunken garden became one of the fair's most talked-about attractions.

Welcome to San Diego in 1935

Twenty years after the famous 1915 Panama-California Exposition helped transform Balboa Park, San Diego staged another major fair: the California Pacific International Exposition of 1935–1936.

The city wanted tourists. It wanted national attention. And it wanted to show America that San Diego had a bright future despite the Depression.

The exposition included art, industry, science, architecture, international exhibits and plenty of entertainment.

It also had a midway packed with attractions that sound almost unbelievable today.

Then There Was Zoro Garden

Zoro Garden occupied a naturalistic sunken area near Gold Gulch. Historical accounts from the San Diego History Center describe a colony of roughly 50 performers who spent their days reading, playing handball, eating vegetables and lounging in the California sunshine.

They were promoted as nudists.

But the historical photographs tell a slightly different story.

The performers were generally not completely nude. Men wore trunks or loincloths, while women wore G-strings or other minimal costumes. Some even wore ordinary shoes.

So calling Zoro Garden a genuine nudist colony is probably generous. It was much closer to a carefully staged midway attraction built around the public's fascination with nudism.

Yes, People Paid to Watch Them

Visitors paid admission to enter an open-air amphitheater overlooking the garden.

And apparently not everyone wanted to pay.

The San Diego History Center notes that visitors to neighboring Gold Gulch quickly discovered knotholes in the wooden fence separating the attractions.

In other words, San Diego had peeping Toms trying to get a free look at the nudist colony.

Some contemporary descriptions even pointed out vantage points elsewhere in the exposition where particularly resourceful visitors could look into the garden.

Meet Queen Zorine

The attraction had its own celebrity: Queen Zorine, sometimes spelled Zorina in contemporary coverage.

Newspapers followed her activities, and the nudist attraction generated a remarkable amount of publicity.

One of the stranger episodes came when famed evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson visited the exposition.

Contemporary newspaper accounts reported that Zorine invited McPherson to visit the colony. McPherson reportedly expressed interest in seeing the attraction as material for future sermons, although she declined an invitation to take tea with the nudists.

That may be one of the most 1935 San Diego sentences ever written.

Even Real Nudists Complained

The strangest twist may be that actual nudists reportedly objected to Zoro Garden.

Contemporary San Diego newspaper coverage referenced amateur nudists questioning whether the performers represented genuine nudism at all.

That distinction matters.

During the 1930s, organized nudism was developing as a lifestyle movement that emphasized health, nature and recreation. Zoro Garden borrowed that imagery but packaged it as paid entertainment for curious fairgoers.

The exposition itself promoted the attraction using language about healthy living and nature, while simultaneously marketing it as something spectators would pay to see.

San Diego's 1935 Fair Was Filled With Strange Attractions

Zoro Garden wasn't an isolated oddity.

The exposition's amusement areas included Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not, unusual sideshow performers, a flea circus, a snake farm, a Globe of Death motorcycle attraction, Gold Gulch, a robot exhibit and numerous spectacles that reflected the entertainment culture of the era.

There was also an attraction historically called the “Midget Village,” using terminology common at the time but considered inappropriate today.

The contrast is remarkable: world-class art, architecture and science exhibits existed alongside attractions deliberately designed to shock, amuse and satisfy people's curiosity.

So Where Was the Nudist Colony?

Here's the best part: the location still exists.

The historic Zoro Garden site is in Balboa Park between the present-day Casa de Balboa area and the Fleet Science Center.

According to the City of San Diego, the former nudist-colony site is now known as Zoro Garden and functions as a butterfly garden.

The sunken stone grotto contains plants that support different stages of the butterfly life cycle.

Thousands of visitors probably walk past it without realizing what once happened there.

Imagine Trying This at Balboa Park Today

Picture the marketing meeting.

“We need something that will drive attendance to Balboa Park.”

“Museums?”

“Science?”

“Gardens?”

“How about fifty semi-nude people living in a garden while tourists pay to watch them?”

Apparently, in 1935, that was a perfectly reasonable idea.

The Bigger Story Behind the Spectacle

Zoro Garden is funny to look back on, but it also tells us something important about world's fairs and expositions.

These events weren't simply educational exhibitions. They were enormous entertainment businesses competing for attendance.

Organizers needed attractions people would talk about — and Zoro Garden certainly accomplished that.

The result is one of those wonderfully strange pieces of San Diego history hiding in plain sight.

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