Inside Bombay Beach, California’s ‘Rotting Riviera’

The smell is the first thing that hits you. 

It’s not the smell you expect from the seaside. It’s not that neat, briney tang full of promise. This is heavier – sweet and sour and chemical, like a fishmonger’s skip left out in the sun. It hangs in the air, invisible but physical, a presence you walk into. By the time you see the water of the Salton Sea, your body already knows something is wrong.

The shoreline gives way underfoot. It’s no longer sand, but a springy crust of pulverised bone and salt. Millions of fish die here in cycles, suffocated by salinity and toxic algae blooms. What remains is a pale, granular geology of fish skeletons. Each step makes a faint crunching sigh, like walking across a bowl of broken porcelain. The water is a strange metallic green, flat as hammered tin, and does not sparkle so much as glare.

There are no yachts here anymore. No water skiers cutting ribbons across the surface. Nothing to suggest that this was ever designed for pleasure. Just a slow retreating line where the sea is shrinking back from itself, exposing more skeletons every year.

Welcome to Bombay Beach, California. 

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To understand how this came to be, you first have to understand water. 

Imperial County is a part of California that bears no resemblance to the one sold on postcards. This is farmland California, hard-scrabbled and poor, a million miles from the palm-tree gloss of the coast. Just north of the Mexican border, vast irrigated fields of fruit trees glow an unnatural green against the beige Sonoran desert, a mirage of water politics and migrant labour.

In 1905, engineers diverted the Colorado River to irrigate this desert farmland. But the canal broke and for nearly two years the river poured unchecked into the Salton Sink, flooding a dry salt basin that had not held water for centuries. Thus, the accidental sea was born. And that mistake became a lake.

By the 1950s and ​’60s, the Salton Sea was being marketed as the Riviera of Southern California. Sinatra holidayed here. There were water-ski championships, a pastel-hued advert for post-war American optimism. Developers sold that optimism by the lot and Bombay Beach emerged as a lakeside fantasy town – clapboard houses, boat slips, cocktail hours glowing in the sunset. 

Then the river was cut back to heel. Agricultural runoff – fertiliser, pesticides, salt – flowed in without any fresh water to dilute it, while the ​‘sea’ rapidly evaporated in the baking Sonoran sun. Salinity rose higher than the Pacific and fish began to suffocate in droves. Sea birds fed on the dying fish and died in turn – 15,000 of them in 1996 – rotting on the Riviera in thick, sour-smelling drifts.

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Driving into Bombay Beach feels like crossing into a post-apocalyptic rehearsal space. Trailers sit tilted on salt-gnawed lots. Telephone poles lean at acute angles. Murals bloom on the sides of abandoned structures: desert saints, mirrored slogans, technicolour skulls.

There are perhaps a few hundred residents now, depending on who is counting and who has left for the season. The median age skews toward leathery. Retirees, artists, off-grid optimists, and those who simply never quite left when the party did.

Over the past few decades, Bombay Beach has been rebranded by artists as something between an installation and living protest, a Mad Maxian desert fantasy played out in real time. Since 2016, the Bombay Beach Biennale has brought in a loose collective of disillusioned LA artists, set designers, burners, drifters, people who know how to make something out of nothing and are drawn, for reasons they explain differently each time, to places where things are already falling apart.

A rusted car balanced vertically like a prayer. A drive-in cinema screen facing a field of salt and nothingness. A skeletal ​“opera house” assembled from scrap wood, its stage open to the wind. Televisions stacked into a ziggurat of static. An enormous, mirrored cube catching the desert light and throwing it back at whoever dares look.

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The installations carry a kind of deliberate incompleteness, things placed rather than finished, ideas left exposed. Art here is not decorative; it is situational. It only makes sense because the sea is dying.

I meet a sun-bleached man in a sun-bleached cowboy hat who introduces himself simply as ​“Gary, for now.” He gestures at a welded sculpture of a fish mid-scream. ​“It’s not subtle,” he admits. ​“Nothing out here is.” His laugh is dry and short. ​“You either lean into the apocalypse or you leave.”

Another woman, barefoot and sharp-eyed, tells me she came for a weekend and never went back to Los Angeles. ​“There’s space here,” she says. ​“Not just physical space, but narrative space.” She talks about the town as if it were a blank page, gesturing to the collapsing dunes and fish bones.

There are residents who do not romanticise the ruin.

A hand-painted A‑Frame near the water reads: HELP OUR SEA. Locals speak of broken promises: state mitigation plans, dust suppression projects, habitat restoration that moves at bureaucratic speed while the shoreline recedes in grim predictability. As the water shrinks, exposed playa becomes toxic dust, whipped into poisonous clouds by the desert winds, carrying agricultural residues into the lungs of children in surrounding communities.

One resident tells me, ​“They treated it like a mistake. But we live with the mistake.” 

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By late afternoon, the heat has flattened everything into a shimmering haze. I retreat to the Ski Inn, advertised as the ​“lowest bar in the Western Hemisphere.” 

Inside, the walls are entirely papered with dollar bills, each one signed, dated, annotated – a papier-mâché archive of passing pilgrims. The bar itself is elbow-smoothed wood, darkened by years of use, sticky in places, scarred in others, ice-cold Modelos sweating into little puddles. Behind it, neon beer signs hum faintly. A jukebox glows in the corner. A ceiling fan churns the air with steady futility.

The place is packed. Residents, visitors, people clearly passing through, people who look as though they arrived years ago with the intention of staying a weekend. The Ski Inn functions as refuge, parlour, canteen and rumour mill. Everyone seems to know one another, or at least to have decided that in a town like this the usual thresholds for acquaintance can be lowered. 

The bartender, a sun-creased, quick witted woman with a sideways grin, slides me a beer and asks what I think so far.

“I’m not sure,” I say.

She laughs. ​“You get used to it. Or you don’t.”

On one wall there’s a photograph of Anthony Bourdain from when he passed through, another saint in the church of American dereliction. Nobody seems especially bothered. The locals nod to it in the way people in out-of-the-way places often do when a famous person once validated their existence.

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There is a whole category of resident here for whom permanence seems beside the point. Bombay Beach attracts the temporarily stranded and the voluntarily unmoored, people who arrive because the rent is low, the horizon is wide and normal life has become either unaffordable or intolerable. The town has the atmosphere of a community assembled under unusual circumstances, held together by a shared tolerance for precarity.

Next to me, over a sweating bottle of Modelo, I get talking to a young woman from Nevada. She is in her 20s, tanned into a kind of leathered brightness, wearing boots and a denim jacket with scorch marks on one cuff. She tells me she’s a fire breather by trade and has been in Bombay Beach for a few months: ​“Just passing through.”

Another Modelo arrives. Somebody feeds money into the jukebox. A plate lands nearby with a burger and a heap of chips. The room hums with a barroom mixture of heat-fatigue and low-level cheer, people talking not because they have anything especially urgent to say but because the alternative is to sit in silence and think too hard about where they are.

For half an hour, maybe more, the place is perfect.

Then someone opens the door, and the smell comes back in.

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Back outside, the light turns theatrical. The sky over the Salton Sea turns from sherbet to bruised purple. The water reflects it beautifully, birds dancing in low formation. For a moment, you can imagine the old Riviera: cocktails, laughter, speedboats carving silhouettes.

Then the wind shifts and the smell returns, dense and intimate.

Bombay Beach is not simply weird Americana. It is an X‑ray of optimism gone saline, a place where human engineering, environmental neglect and artistic reinvention coexist in uneasy balance. The apocalypse here, at least, is cinematic. 

If America has a subconscious, it might look something like this: a drying lake, a stubborn community, art installed in the ruins, and the persistent smell of something they once thought would last forever.

Jack Burke is a freelance writer. Follow him on Instagram.

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