Drive past the trailhead at Abalone Cove on a Saturday morning and you will see a parking lot with room to spare, a locked gate where a beach access trail used to run, and almost no one walking toward it. Word has spread that the Palos Verdes Nature Preserve is a landslide zone now, off limits, not worth the trip. That word is only half right, and the half that's wrong is costing residents access to some of the best hiking on the peninsula.
The Preserve is not one place. It is roughly 1,500 acres split into eleven separate reserves that the city owns and co-manages with the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy, each with its own trailheads, parking rules, and, as of this summer, its own closure status. Two of those reserves are genuinely and indefinitely shut. The other nine are not, and several of them see a fraction of the foot traffic they did before the landslide made headlines, simply because the story got flattened into "the Preserve is closed."
The Corner That Actually Closed
The closures are real, and they are specific. The city's trail alerts page shows that the open space, trails, beach, and archery range east of Inspiration Point have been closed since September 27, 2024, due to landslide related activity. Separately, as of July 9, 2024, Abalone Cove Beach, Sacred Cove Beach, and every beach access trail inside the Abalone Cove Reserve were shut to the public until further notice because of accelerated land movement in the Portuguese Bend complex. Portuguese Bend Reserve itself, the largest single reserve in the system at 424 acres, remains closed. AllTrails' own status flags for the Palos Verdes Bluffs Trail and the Portuguese Bend Landslide Loop both note that as of July 2026 the closure is indefinite, which means it has now outlasted the initial announcement by nearly two years with no reopening date attached.
William Lavoie, a member of the Palos Verdes South Bay group of the Sierra Club who has hiked the Preserve about once a week for 25 years, described the terrain that prompted the shutdown to LAist in April: "I understand why they closed the trails because there were some pretty good-sized fissures." That is not a minor caution. It is the kind of ground failure that makes a closure sign the responsible call rather than an overreaction.
What the Parking Receipts Reveal
The clearest evidence that people have stopped distinguishing "this reserve is closed" from "the whole peninsula is closed" is not anecdotal. It is in the city's own revenue numbers. Reporting from LAist in April 2026 found that annual parking revenue at Abalone Cove, which used to run around $150,000 a year, had fallen to just $11,000. Del Cerro Park told a similar story, with parking revenue dropping from about $32,000 in fiscal year 2022-23 to roughly $4,000. Some of that decline reflects the actual closed acreage at Abalone Cove. But Del Cerro Park itself sits well outside the closed zone, and its collapse in visits suggests the reputational damage traveled further than the physical damage did.
The Reserves the Closure Signs Never Mention
Here is what the same closure alerts and reserve pages show is still open, still maintained, and still free to walk into with no permit beyond the usual dawn to dusk hours.
| Reserve | Status this summer | What's there |
|---|---|---|
| Portuguese Bend Reserve | Closed indefinitely | Landslide zone, no public access |
| Abalone Cove Reserve | Beach access trails closed | Abalone Cove Park and its parking lot remain open |
| Forrestal Reserve | Open | 155 acres, Pirate Trail, Flying Mane Loop |
| Vicente Bluffs Reserve | Open | Coastal bluff scrub, basalt rock formations, dirt lot at the Interpretive Center |
| Ocean Trails Reserve | Open | Rancho Palos Verdes Coastal Trail, free parking at Founders Park |
| Alta Vicente Reserve | Open | 55 acres, inland multi-use trails, pedestrian-only coastal section |
| San Ramon Reserve | Open | Switchback Trail, reopened after spring maintenance |
Forrestal Reserve sits directly southeast of the closed Portuguese Bend land, close enough that a visitor could reasonably assume the closure bleeds over. It does not. Street parking runs along Forrestal Drive south of the Ladera Linda driveway, and on weekends and holidays there's additional parking inside the first gate near the Pirate Trail trailhead, open from 7 a.m. to an hour after sunset. On AllTrails, the Pirate and Flying Mane Loop carries a 4.7-star rating across 991 reviews and no closure tag at all, a contrast that's easy to miss if you never open the app past the reserve names that do carry one.
Vicente Bluffs Reserve is another case where proximity creates confusion. It sits just up the coast from the closed Abalone Cove trails, but it is its own reserve, built around the bluffs of Lower Point Vicente, a stretch of fishing access frontage, and habitat inside the Oceanfront Estates project totaling roughly 84 acres combined. Trailheads are off Palos Verdes Drive South, with parking in the dirt lot at the Point Vicente Interpretive Center, and the reserve is open the standard hour before sunrise to an hour after sunset.
One Closure That Already Reversed
Not every closure notice out of Rancho Palos Verdes is about the landslide, and conflating them makes the situation look worse than it is. In late March, the city closed the Switchback Trail inside San Ramon Reserve for vegetation maintenance, a routine trim-and-clear job unrelated to ground movement. The closure ran from March 26 through April 5, and the trail has been open since. It's a small example, but it matters for how residents read future alerts. A city trail notice can mean landslide, or it can mean a crew is out clearing brush for a week and a half. The two look identical in a headline and very different on the ground.
Reading the Map Correctly
None of this changes what's happening at Portuguese Bend and Abalone Cove, and it shouldn't be read as a reason to ignore posted closures. Those signs exist because the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy and city geologists have watched real fissures open in real trails, and the safest response is the one the city has taken. What it does change is the assumption that the entire 1,500-acre Preserve is off the table this summer. Nine of eleven reserves are not. Forrestal's Pirate Trail, the Vicente Bluffs loop past the Interpretive Center, the Coastal Trail through Ocean Trails Reserve, and the multi-use paths through Alta Vicente are all walkable right now, most with parking lots that have room precisely because so many people believe there's nowhere left to go.
If you live here, the practical move is simple: check the reserve name, not just the peninsula's reputation, before you decide a trail is off limits. The city keeps its alerts page current, and five minutes there beats guessing before a Saturday hike.
If you're a homeowner in Rancho Palos Verdes and ever curious what a market shaped by stories like this one is doing to home values in your particular corner of the peninsula, Lisa Bourque brings a CPA's eye for detail to that conversation, along with the same instinct for checking the specific over the general.
