Visiting Claremont, United States: Top Sights on Foot

Looking for things to do in Claremont? This California city combines museums, historic places, and a relaxed college-town atmosphere. Its cultural highlights include art collections, an unusual paleontology museum, and a former theatre with a distinctive history. Neywo also offers a free audio guide for Claremont with four narrated places, available in 11 languages.

What to see in Claremont

The city’s museums and historic landmarks provide a varied introduction to Claremont. From art spanning centuries to fossil evidence collected by students, these places reveal different sides of the community’s cultural life.

Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery

The Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery is an art museum in Claremont and a dedicated place to spend time with works of art. It offers a quiet cultural stop for visitors exploring the city’s museums.

Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology

The Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology has an unusual setting: it is part of The Webb Schools and is the only nationally accredited museum on a secondary school campus in the United States.

Its exhibitions are arranged in two circular halls, each covering 4,000 square feet. Together, they present vertebrate, invertebrate, and track fossils. The fossil tracks are especially notable, with a collection widely recognized as one of the most diverse in the world. Rather than showing only fossilized remains, the museum also focuses on traces of ancient movement and behavior.

The collections contain about 140,000 specimens. Around 95 percent were found by Webb students during fossil-collecting expeditions known as Peccary Trips, which usually focus on locations in California, Utah, and Montana.

Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College

The Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College is a contemporary museum with a collection that spans centuries and continents. It is free and open to the public, making it one of the city’s accessible cultural attractions.

Completed in 2020, the Benton replaced the Montgomery Art Gallery, which had housed the Pomona College Museum of Art since 1958. Its collection includes approximately 20,000 items, including Italian Renaissance panel paintings, Indigenous American art and artifacts, and American and European prints, drawings, and photographs.

The range of works makes the museum a useful stop for seeing different artistic traditions and media brought together in one place.

Padua Hills Theatre

The Padua Hills Theatre is a former Claremont theatre remembered for its Mexican-themed musicals. Its story lasted more than four decades, from 1931 to 1974, giving the building a distinctive place in the city’s cultural history.

For more destinations in the state, explore California, or see the wider United States.

Explore Claremont with Neywo

There are no scheduled group walks or fixed tour routes listed for Claremont. Instead, Neywo’s free audio guide covers four narrated places. The app tells the story of each place as you reach it, at your own pace, with no group and no schedule. Narration is available in 11 languages.

Download Neywo and use the Claremont audio guide to explore the city independently, stopping at the places that interest you and listening as you arrive.