The lowest place people live in America is a rusted, salty art town east of Palm Springs

It’s 223 feet below sea level and still sinking

Bombay Beach sits lower than anywhere else people call home in the United States, dug into the Sonoran Desert about an hour southeast of Palm Springs. Only 231 people live here.

The Salton Sea laps at one edge, salt-crusted and strange, while rusted car shells and painted houses line the other.

It draws visitors from around the world, and once you see what happened here and what it became, you’ll understand why.

The Salton Sea wasn’t supposed to exist

Nobody planned California’s largest inland body of water.

In 1905, heavy rains pushed the Colorado River through irrigation canals and into a dry desert basin called the Salton Sink. For nearly two years, the river just kept pouring in.

By the time engineers closed the breach in early 1907, a lake 35 miles long and 15 miles wide had filled the desert floor.

Agricultural runoff from the Imperial and Coachella Valleys has kept it from drying up ever since.

Bigger than Yosemite in its heyday

Hard to believe now, but in the 1950s and 1960s, the Salton Sea drew more visitors per year than Yosemite National Park. Communities like Bombay Beach grew along the shoreline with hotels, marinas and vacation homes.

People came for fishing, boating and water skiing on what promoters called the new California Riviera. The area competed with Palm Springs for tourists, and for a couple of decades, it held its own.

The good years didn’t last.

The slow-motion collapse of a resort town

The Salton Sea has no natural outlet. Every year, salt and agricultural chemicals from the surrounding valley farms concentrated in the water with nowhere to go.

By the 1970s, the lake had turned dangerously salty and polluted. Tropical storms late that decade flooded buildings along the shore.

Fish died off in massive numbers, and the smell chased out the tourists and most of the residents. By the 1980s and ’90s, Bombay Beach was effectively a ghost town.

Artists found the ruins first

Around 2011, artists started showing up. Cheap abandoned properties, a decayed desert landscape and complete freedom to build whatever they wanted pulled in creative people looking for something no established city could give them.

They converted crumbling houses and empty lots into studios, galleries and outdoor installations.

Nearby Slab City and East Jesus had already built a reputation for off-grid art communities in the same stretch of desert, and Bombay Beach slotted right into that orbit.

The Biennale put the town on the map

In 2016, filmmaker Tao Ruspoli, hotel owner Stefan Ashkenazy and public art producer Lily Johnson White co-founded the Bombay Beach Biennale, a free event open to anyone who shows up.

It runs on the shores of the Salton Sea and packs in live performances, philosophy talks, film screenings and new art installations. The Biennale hit its 10th anniversary in 2026.

It now runs on even-numbered years, with a smaller gathering called Convivium filling the odd years in between.

Outdoor art covers nearly every block

Walk the small grid of streets and you’ll find permanent installations on almost every corner.

Greg Haberny, a New York artist, rebuilt an abandoned house into the Hermitage Museum, a working contemporary gallery in the middle of the desert.

James Ostrer designed the Bombay Beach Opera House inside a former home, painted blue and used as a performance space.

Sculptures, murals and site-specific pieces made from found materials fill the gaps between buildings. The harsh desert conditions reshape the older works every year.

Rusted cars parked at a screen showing nothing

One of the most photographed spots in town isn’t a painting or a sculpture. It’s a row of vintage car shells, rusted and gutted, lined up as if parked at a drive-in theater.

They face a blank white truck trailer where a screen should be. Ashkenazy hand-picked each wrecked car from a junkyard to match the atmosphere of the place.

During the Biennale, that trailer becomes an actual screen and the drive-in runs films again, the way it never quite did before.

The Ski Inn has been open since the resort days

The Ski Inn has outlasted every hotel, marina and vacation rental that once defined this stretch of shoreline. It opened in the 1950s when water skiing was the main draw, and the name stuck even after the water turned.

It calls itself the lowest bar in the Western Hemisphere, which tracks given the town’s elevation. Step inside and you’ll see why people keep coming back.

Every wall, the ceiling, the doors and even the ceiling fan blades are covered in dollar bills, each one signed with a name going back decades.

The beach looks like nowhere else in America

A berm built in the 1970s runs between the town and the water, and past it, the landscape shifts completely. Salt-crusted ground stretches toward the receding shoreline.

Remnants of old structures poke through the surface. Scattered art pieces sit where beach umbrellas might have gone sixty years ago.

A swing set installed in the shallows of the retreating Salton Sea pulls more visitors than almost anything else here.

When the sun drops behind the mountains, the surrounding desert and water catch the last light together.

Getting around takes a golf cart and some planning

The nearest gas station is about 20 miles away in Niland, which is why golf carts outnumber cars on the streets. Services are thin, so bring what you need before you arrive.

The town’s art installations are free and open at all times, and you can cover the whole grid on foot or by cart in a single afternoon.

People do live here year-round, so treat private property like private property and give residents their space.

The road trip that pulls everything together

Bombay Beach sits about 90 minutes from Palm Springs and roughly 150 miles from Los Angeles along California State Route 111. Most people who come make a day of the surrounding area.

Salvation Mountain, a folk art hillside covered in bright paint, sits about 20 minutes south near Niland. Slab City, the off-the-grid community next to it, is another stop on the same route.

Together, these destinations add up to one of the strangest and most memorable road trips in the American West.

Visit Bombay Beach on California’s State Route 111

Bombay Beach sits on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea in Imperial County, off State Route 111. It’s free to visit and the art is accessible year-round, around the clock.

The Ski Inn is your best bet for food and drinks while you’re there. Plan your visit between November and March.

Summer temperatures regularly climb past 110 degrees, and there’s almost no shade. The official website for the Bombay Beach Biennale has current event dates and schedules.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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