Cardiff By The Sea

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Along the coastline of North San Diego County lies cozy Cardiff-by-the-Sea, in the Southern portion of the city of Encinitas. The community features fine dining at Restaurant Row, narrow beaches with impressive tide pools and a beachfront campground all affording spectacular Pacific Ocean views and sunsets.

The core of this tiny community is the Cardiff Town Center, the primary shopping area, offering restaurants, professional services, a gym, surf/swim shops and the gourmet Seaside Market. Many tri-athletes call Cardiff home and can work out with other fitness fanatics at the local gyms and exercise centers.

Cardiff Reef, alongside Historic Highway 101 at the mouth of the San Elijo Lagoon, is a small beach park and ideal spot for surfers year-round as the surf consistently breaks both right and left. Bathrooms, a parking lot and lifeguards are available at Cardiff Reef.

The beautiful, remote San Elijo campus of Mira Costa College offers local residents an opportunity for a two-year program for full-time students or non-credit classes evenings and weekends just for fun.

Cardiff real estate, Cardiff homes & Cardiff condo's like other coastal communities, run the gamut from older more moderately priced single-family dwellings to multi-million dollar custom estates, all in a diverse range of styles and sizes. A limited number of luxury townhomes (Mozart Creek, Orinda Village & Cardiff Park) and condominium units (Cardiff Cove & Park Place) range in price from $350,000 to over $1 million. Single-family homes (Poinsettia Heights, Ocean Crest Estates, Playa Riviera, Edgewater Terrace, Sea Village, Sandy Point, Seaside, Cardiff Glen) start in the mid-$600,000s and have recently reached over $2 million for custom homes with panoramic ocean views. West of Interstate 5, many of the single-family homes dot the hillsides affording them exquisite views, with several new custom homes built in small pockets of land. In the exclusive "composer district," large custom homes on streets with names such as Brahms, Liszt and Chopin feature ocean views and private canyons. With a total of approximately 4,700 homes and little vacant land available, less than a dozen new homes are built in Cardiff each year and many areundergoing major remodels. A good reason why Cardiff homes are so desirable and costly, but well worth it.