Ask most people in Rancho Palos Verdes why half the coastline is roped off and they'll give you one answer: the landslide. It's a fair shorthand. It's also wrong in a way that matters if you're trying to figure out which trail might reopen someday and which one is gone for good.
There isn't one landslide moving beneath the Peninsula. There are at least two, and through early 2026 they were behaving very differently from each other. Survey data collected in early January 2026 and presented to the City Council that February showed the Abalone Cove Landslide accelerating by about 18 percent since the previous November, up to roughly 2.15 inches a week, while the Portuguese Bend Landslide accelerated by about 20.8 percent over the same stretch, to about 1.38 inches a week. Different rates, different trajectories, same headline.
The Numbers That Don't Match
By April 2026, a different set of reporting told a calmer story. LAist described land movement as having slowed to about 1.6 inches a week overall, crediting a network of dewatering wells the city installed to pull groundwater out of the hillside. Read those two data points side by side and they look contradictory. Read them as a story about two separate slides responding differently to the same fix, and they make sense. The wells appear to be doing real work on part of the complex while the ground beneath Abalone Cove kept accelerating regardless just months earlier.
That distinction is the whole ballgame if you live here. It's why a beach half a mile from your house might stay closed indefinitely while a trail somewhere else has a real shot at reopening once the wells catch up.
Why the Wells Only Fixed Half the Problem
City geologists have said the movement in the Portuguese Bend and Abalone Cove areas traces back to a complex of ancient slides on the south side of the city, reactivated by the above average rainfall of 2022 and 2023 that pushed some sections to move as much as a foot a week at the worst of it. The wells target groundwater, and groundwater isn't distributed evenly under a hillside. Where the wells are pulling water out faster than the ground can refill, movement eases. Where the geology routes water differently, or where the well network hasn't reached yet, the slide keeps going.
City manager Ara Mihranian put it plainly earlier this year: "The city has taken a huge hit on this emergency response." That's not a comment about trail closures. It's a comment about a municipal budget that had spent close to $65 million on landslide response since October 2022 by the time its fiscal year closed in June 2026, against an annual operating budget of about $40 million. The wells are the reason some of this might stabilize. They're also the reason the bill keeps growing.
What's Actually Closed Right Now
If you're planning a walk this week, here's what's off limits and has been for a while:
- Abalone Cove Beach and Sacred Cove Beach, along with every beach access trail in the Abalone Cove Reserve, closed to the public since July 2024 due to land movement
- The section of the Catalina Trail and its bridge between Lakeview Trail and East Portal Trail, including the Coastal Switchback Trail, closed indefinitely for geologic hazard
- The open space, trails, beach, and archery range east of Inspiration Point, closed since September 2024
Altogether, roughly 16 miles of trail across the Portuguese Bend, Abalone Cove, and Filiorum Reserves remain affected. The city has been candid that some of it will likely never reopen. The ground in the hardest hit sections is now riddled with chasms as deep as 20 feet, some spanning up to 12 feet across, and city manager Ara Mihranian has said staff mostly monitor the worst areas by drone now rather than walk them, since open fissures make it impossible to safely cross certain trails on foot.
What's Still Open, and Why It Matters Where
The flip side is that a meaningful stretch of coastline hasn't gone anywhere. Pelican Cove is still open year round, and the Pescadero Trail down to it is still one of the better tide pool walks on the Peninsula, though it's worth knowing before you bring the dog that it's a pet free zone. The Terranea Discovery Trail segment connecting Point Vicente Lighthouse to Pelican Cove is open too, along with the Point Vicente Interpretive Center, which keeps its museum and gift shop open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and remains the best spot on this stretch of coast to watch the Pacific gray whale migration each winter, docent led hikes included courtesy of the volunteer group Los Serenos de Point Vicente.
Further south, the Ocean Trails Reserve still functions as habitat land restored and preserved alongside Trump National Golf Club, south of Palos Verdes Drive, and Rancho Palos Verdes Beach below it remains accessible. None of this is coincidence. Every one of these open spaces sits outside the Portuguese Bend and Abalone Cove slide complex entirely, which is the same reason the city's Civic Center park, a former Nike missile base turned public park with a sand volleyball court, tennis court, picnic area, and dog park, has never appeared on a closure list. Geography, not policy, decided what stayed open.
The Bill Nobody Budgeted For
The financial squeeze runs in both directions. Parking revenue at the Abalone Cove Park lot has dropped from roughly $150,000 a year to just $11,000, and parking near Del Cerro Park fell from about $32,000 in fiscal year 2022-23 to around $4,000. That's lost income on top of the emergency spending, and it's part of why the city applied for state and federal help and has had, in its own words, little success securing it.
The one program that has materialized is a $42 million voluntary buyout fund, announced in October 2024 by the city, FEMA, and the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, for homeowners whose properties have been damaged or threatened by the movement. Homes bought through it become permanently deed restricted open space. It's a narrow tool, built for the worst affected parcels, not a general fix for the slide itself.
A Chapel Betting on the Other Side of the Line
The clearest symbol of this two speed problem is Wayfarers Chapel. The Lloyd Wright glass sanctuary closed in February 2024 as the ground beneath it kept shifting, and by July of that year it had been fully disassembled and put into storage, its 100-seat frame taken apart panel by panel after 73 years of weddings.
What makes the story worth following now isn't the closure. It's where the chapel wants to go next. In June 2025, chapel leadership announced a prospective new site at Battery Barnes, a former military installation about a mile west of the original chapel, right next to City Hall. The pitch is specific: same coastal bluff character, same ocean views, but outside the boundary of the active slide. Getting there still requires a federal land transfer from the Coast Guard, which Representative Ted Lieu has been working to move through legislation as of January 2026, and a fundraising campaign that needs at least $10 million just to rebuild the chapel, with another $20 million on the table if a planned visitor center, museum, and cafe move forward too.
In other words, the people closest to this landslide, the ones trying to rebuild a National Historic Landmark, are making the same calculation this post is making. They're not waiting for Portuguese Bend to stabilize. They're moving one mile away, onto ground the slide hasn't touched.
Planning Around a Moving Coastline
None of this is static, and that's the part worth remembering before you plan a hike. The city's trail conditions and alerts page is updated as closures change, and the land movement updates page carries the survey data as the city receives it, including notice of any planned overnight closures on Palos Verdes Drive South near Altamira Canyon, in the stretch known locally as the ski jump, where regrading work has been under discussion. If you're heading toward Portuguese Bend or Abalone Cove specifically, check first. If you're headed to Pelican Cove, the Interpretive Center, or the trails around Ocean Trails Reserve, you're on ground that has stayed open through all of this, for reasons that have everything to do with which side of the slide line it sits on.
Living on the Peninsula means holding two facts at once: parts of this coastline are genuinely, permanently changed, and parts of it never moved at all. Knowing which is which is the difference between a wasted trip and a good Saturday.
If you're weighing a move within the Peninsula, thinking about what a property near the slide boundary means for the years ahead, or just want a straight answer about a specific block, Kawata Homes has spent decades watching this coastline change. Reach out to Cindy and Tiffany for a personalized market consultation.
