DeLaveaga Park

DeLaveaga Park is one of Santa Cruz's great outdoor resources — a sprawling forested park of over 500 acres that manages to serve families, hikers, disc golfers, and nature lovers simultaneously without any of them feeling crowded. For families, the park's scale and variety make it genuinely exceptional.

The DeLaveaga Disc Golf Course is the park's claim to fame beyond the Santa Cruz community. Widely considered one of the finest disc golf courses in Northern California, it winds through mature trees on challenging terrain that rewards skilled players while remaining accessible to beginners. For families with teens or tweens who want something more interesting than a playground, introducing disc golf in this setting is a memorable experience.

Discs can often be rented at the course, and the sport has a low barrier to entry — within 30 minutes, most beginners are having genuine fun.

For the younger kids while parents or older siblings disc golf, the park has a developed playground area and open green space where toddlers and little kids can play independently. The forested trails attract hikers of all levels and provide the kind of natural exploration that Santa Cruz's urban parks can't offer.

The combination of a world-class disc golf course, family playground, hiking trails, and forested open space makes DeLaveaga unusually versatile. It's one of those parks where you can split your group productively — younger kids at the playground, older kids and adults on the disc golf course — and reunite for lunch at the picnic tables.

Free general park access; disc golf has a nominal fee.