California · Ghost town
Bombay Beach
The lowest community in the United States, 223 feet below sea level, emptied by the slow poisoning of the sea it was built for.
Position Imperial County, California · 33.3508, -115.7297
Bombay Beach sits on the Salton Sea in Imperial County at 223 feet below sea level, which makes it the lowest settlement in the country. Its population was 231 at the 2020 census, down from 295 in 2010 and 366 in 2000.
It was built as a resort. Through the middle of the twentieth century the Salton Sea drew boaters and swimmers, and the shoreline communities were holiday towns. Then the water began to shrink and its salinity climbed, the fish died in enormous numbers, and the smell and the dust ended the tourism within a decade.
What is left along the old shoreline is genuinely strange: submerged and re-exposed buildings, a drowned marina, sand made largely of fish bones. An art scene has grown up around it, which some residents welcome and others do not.
The exposed lakebed is a public health problem rather than an aesthetic one. Dust blowing off it carries a century of agricultural runoff, and air quality in the valley is a live political issue.
Facts checked against the Wikipedia article Bombay Beach, California. The words above are ours.