Stand in the Golden Cove parking lot on a Saturday morning and you can feel people deciding which way to walk. For years the reflex was south, down Palos Verdes Drive toward the Portuguese Bend Reserve, where the trail network spilled across the bluffs toward the old landslide complex everyone quietly ignored. That reflex is out of date now. The reserve that used to anchor a weekend walk is the one piece of the preserve that isn't there anymore, and most of the foot traffic in Rancho Palos Verdes has already rerouted without much fanfare.
That's the part worth saying plainly, because it changes where a Saturday actually goes: the biggest single piece of the Palos Verdes Nature Preserve is closed, and has been for two years, and the rest of the peninsula's trail system has absorbed that loss well enough that most residents have simply adjusted their loop rather than mourned it.
The Reserve Lost Its Biggest Piece
The Palos Verdes Nature Preserve covers roughly 1,500 acres split across eleven reserves that permit public access, co-managed by the city and the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy. Portuguese Bend Reserve is the largest of the eleven at 424 acres, close to a third of the entire preserve by itself. It's also the one that closed.
Since July 2024, Abalone Cove Beach, Sacred Cove Beach, and every beach access trail inside the Abalone Cove Reserve have been off limits due to accelerated land movement in the Portuguese Bend Landslide complex. The Catalina Trail bridge between Lakeview Trail and East Portal Trail, along with the Coastal Switchback Trail, is closed indefinitely for the same reason. The city has closed roughly 13.5 miles of trail across the Portuguese Bend, Abalone Cove, Filiorum, and Forrestal reserves in total, though inside Forrestal the main loop itself has stayed open. Reporting from earlier this year found the land is still moving, just more slowly, about 1.6 inches a week now compared to the seven inches a week recorded at the height of the crisis, thanks in part to dewatering wells the city installed.
What's actually gone, in plain terms:
- The full Portuguese Bend Reserve trail network
- Abalone Cove Beach and Sacred Cove Beach access trails
- The Catalina Trail bridge and Coastal Switchback Trail
- Wayfarers Chapel and its surrounding grounds, which sit inside the same landslide zone
You can check current status yourself on the city's trail conditions and alerts page before heading out, since some closures shift as geologists reassess sections.
The Walk That's Taken Its Place
Two loops have picked up the traffic that Portuguese Bend used to carry, and neither requires driving past a landslide zone to reach.
The first is the bluff walk around Point Vicente Interpretive Center, on the Vicente Bluffs Reserve at 31501 Palos Verdes Drive West. It's an easy, mostly level walk along the cliff edge with the lighthouse as a fixed point, free to enter, free to park, open daily. The second is the Forrestal Preserve Loop, a 2.9-mile moderate route through the 155-acre Forrestal Reserve with 764 feet of elevation gain, popular enough for hiking, birding, and horseback riding that it holds one of the highest trail ratings on the peninsula. It runs year-round with no closure notices attached to it.
| Route | Distance | Effort | Status this August |
|---|---|---|---|
| Point Vicente / Vicente Bluffs bluff walk | About 1.5 miles round trip | Easy, mostly flat | Open daily, free parking |
| Forrestal Preserve Loop | 2.9 miles | Moderate, 764 ft gain | Open year-round |
| Portuguese Bend Reserve network | N/A | N/A | Closed indefinitely |
Neither replacement loop tries to be Portuguese Bend. What they offer instead is a walk that doesn't end at a closure sign, which turns out to matter more than scenery on a Saturday morning.
Whale Season Already Left. The Bluff Didn't.
If the plan was to spot a gray whale from the bluff, August is the wrong month. The migration runs from December through mid-May, and the volunteer counters from the American Cetacean Society's Los Angeles chapter who staff the Point Vicente patio during that window wrapped their 42nd consecutive season on May 25 and won't be back until December 1. Their final tally for the season logged 214 southbound gray whales, the second-lowest count in the project's history, alongside a record-low 445 northbound.
None of that means the bluff has nothing to offer in the meantime. Dolphins and sea lions are visible from the same clifftop year-round, migration season or not, which is the detail that keeps the walk worth doing even when the whales themselves are somewhere off Alaska. The museum stays open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. regardless of season, and admission and parking are both free.
The Chapel Everyone Still Asks About
Wayfarers Chapel, the Lloyd Wright glass sanctuary that sat inside the same landslide zone as Portuguese Bend, has been closed to the public since February 2024. The chapel's board made the decision to dismantle the structure that May, cataloguing and salvaging the materials, including the memorial bricks, with the intention of rebuilding on stable ground. The most recent word from the chapel itself is that the board and the city have identified Battery Barnes, a former military site next to City Hall, as the leading candidate for a new campus, one with the same ocean views and comparable footprint as the original heritage site. A land transfer from the federal government still has to happen before anything moves forward, and current estimates put the full rebuild near $25 million. For anyone who keeps expecting to see the chapel reopen on a drive down Palos Verdes Drive South, it isn't coming back to that stretch of road. Whatever comes next will likely be a mile or so north, near City Hall.
Golden Cove Still Bookends the Walk
Whichever loop you choose, Golden Cove Shopping Center is still the practical start or finish line it's been since the 1960s, when developer Jerry Moss first proposed the seven-acre center for the site above the tidepool cove it's named for. Trader Joe's has anchored the center since April 2010, when it replaced a longtime Chinese restaurant space. The Starbucks next door opened back in August 2003 as part of a renovation that wrapped that October, and its back patio still delivers the same ocean view toward Catalina Island on a clear day that made it a local fixture from the start.
The rest of the center rounds out a full pre- or post-walk stop: Swan Thai for a sit-down lunch, Yellow Vase and Poke Me for something faster, Tomatillo Mexican Grill and Avenue Italy for dinner options, plus the everyday errands, a bank branch, a pharmacy, dry cleaning, that make it function as a genuine neighborhood center rather than a tourist stop. If the walk runs long and the appetite calls for something more composed, Terranea Resort's cliffside restaurants, Nelson's, Mar'sel, and Catalina Kitchen among them, sit a short drive south along the same stretch of coastline.
The peninsula's walking map redrew itself over the past two years, and most of that redrawing happened without much public notice beyond the trail alert pages. The reserve lost its largest single piece. The chapel that used to mark the turn toward Portuguese Bend is now boxed up and waiting for a new address. What's left, the bluff loop at Point Vicente, the Forrestal climb, the shops at Golden Cove that have anchored the corner since before most current residents moved in, is enough to carry a Saturday just fine. It's just a different Saturday than the one longtime residents remember.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home here, whether you're watching the market from the inside or thinking about what's next, Ryan Shaw Group knows this stretch of coastline block by block. Request Your Home Valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
