The Valley

Bakersfield's natural history museum holds the world's largest collection of Miocene-era fossils from Sharktooth Hill, a 15-million-year-old marine bonebed.

Kern County's zoo focuses on California native species, many non-releasable rescue animals, plus a botanical garden and paleontology exhibits.

Basque sheepherders settled Bakersfield in the early 1900s, leaving a community still active today: the Kern County Basque Club and its Memorial Day festival.

Two public 18-hole courses anchor Kern County golf, alongside three private clubs with a real history of hosting professional tour events.

In the 1950s-60s, Bakersfield built a honky-tonk answer to Nashville, led by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, a real place in American music history.

Nearly 937 acres of restored riparian habitat along the Kern River: flat hiking trails, real birding, one of Bakersfield's largest restoration efforts.

Opened in 1930, remade in Art Deco style in 1953, closed in 1984, and saved by a nonprofit restoration: Bakersfield's most-preserved historic movie theater.

More than 300,000 visitors pack the Kern County Fairgrounds every September for livestock shows, a rodeo, and concerts, dating back to an 1892 fair.

In Taft, a volunteer-run museum built around a surviving 1917 wooden derrick tells the story of the Midway-Sunset Oil Field, California's largest.

A nonprofit-owned preserve spanning tens of thousands of acres where the San Joaquin Valley meets the Transverse Ranges, with free trails and tule elk.