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For a full refund, cancel at least 24 hours before the scheduled departure time.

How long does this tour take?

Please check the tour page for the exact duration.

A Self Guided Audio Tour of UC Berkeley Campus

Q: Where does this tour start?

This tour starts at: This tour starts at Corner of Telegraph - Durant. Before arrival, please install the mobile app and use the code provided on your confirmation ticket. Detailed starting point instructions are available after downloading..

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Overview

UC Berkeley is one of the world's great public universities, and its campus is as intellectually alive as the city surrounding it. On this self-guided audio tour, you'll discover how Nobel Prize winners, student revolutionaries, and football legends shaped a place where academic ambition and civic defiance are equally celebrated. The tour starts at the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Durant Avenue, where you'll cross into campus at Sproul Plaza – the birthplace of the 1964 Free Speech Movement. From Memorial Glade, you'll follow J. Robert Oppenheimer's daily walking route across Strawberry Creek to the Faculty Club, where he and Ernest Lawrence reportedly sketched nuclear weapons research on a linen tablecloth. The tour winds through the Haas School of Business, past California Memorial Stadium – which sits directly on the Hayward Fault and was rebuilt in floating sections to survive an earthquake – before finishing back at Telegraph Avenue and Durant Avenue.

Gallery

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What's Included

✓ Included

Lifetime access to this tour in English before your booking date and after it
Offline access to audio, maps, and geodata
Flexibility to explore at your own pace with a self-guided GPS tour
App for Android and iOS
Directions to the starting point so that when you’re in the right place, the tour will start

✗ Not Included

Smartphone and headphones
Transportation
Food and drink
Personal expenses for admission fees not included during the tour

Itinerary

Stop 1

Begin at the bustling heart of student life on campus, a building named for the civil rights leader whose spirit of organised dissent feels entirely at home in Berkeley's activist tradition. Explore the floors of student services, meeting rooms, and gathering spaces that have hummed with undergraduate energy, political debate, and late-night cramming sessions since the 1960s.

Stop 2

Stand in front of the imposing neoclassical administration building whose broad front steps became the stage for the 1964 Free Speech Movement, when Mario Savio climbed onto a police car and delivered one of the most electrifying speeches in American protest history. Find the granite plaque marking the exact spot where 3,000 students held that police car hostage for 32 hours and permanently changed the relationship between American universities and free expression.

Stop 3

Pass through the ornate bronze gates that once marked the university's southern boundary, when everything beyond them was open pastureland and the city of Berkeley had barely begun to grow. Rub the 4.0 Ball on the nearby Sather Tower fountain for good luck, a student ritual so ingrained that the bronze is worn smooth by decades of anxious hands before midterms.

Stop 4

Stretch out on the broad lawn that serves as Berkeley's living room, a rare open expanse at the geographic heart of a campus more accustomed to intellectual intensity than idle relaxation. Learn why this glade is also infamous as the route of the annual Naked Run, when finals-week stress reaches its logical breaking point and undergraduate dignity is temporarily suspended.

Stop 5

Explore the striking postmodern complex that houses one of the world's most selective business schools, its terraced architecture and open courtyards designed to encourage the kind of collaborative thinking that has produced more Fortune 500 CEOs than almost any institution its size. Notice how the building's design deliberately blurs the boundary between indoor seminar room and outdoor conversation, a philosophy as Californian as the campus itself.

Stop 6

Marvel at the 63,000-seat stadium that sits directly astride the Hayward Fault, rebuilt between 2010 and 2012 in floating sections specifically engineered to ride out a major earthquake without collapsing. Peer through the walls at the Simpson Center high-performance facility, where Cal athletes recover in cryotherapy chambers and train on anti-gravity treadmills in conditions that would have seemed like science fiction when the original stadium opened in 1923.

Stop 7

Approach the grand 1930 building funded by John D. Rockefeller Jr. as a living experiment in international coexistence, designed to house American and foreign students under the same roof at a time when such mixing was considered radical. Discover why I-House has generated more marriages between people of different nationalities than any other residential building on campus, a statistic that would have delighted its idealistic founder.

Stop 8

Pull up a chair at the outdoor terrace of Berkeley's most intellectually storied café, where the combination of strong coffee, afternoon sun, and proximity to the humanities buildings has reportedly produced more completed PhD dissertations than the library itself. Order something and absorb the atmosphere of a place where the line between academic breakthrough and procrastination has always been productively blurred.

Stop 9

Look up at the high-rise towers where generations of Berkeley freshmen have arrived wide-eyed, hauling flat-pack furniture into rooms that will become the setting for friendships, arguments, and the first real taste of independence. Hear the stories of the notable alumni who began their Berkeley lives on these floors, and consider how many world-changing ideas have started in a room about the size of a generous parking space.

Stop 10

End your tour at the campus dining hub where the Southside energy of Telegraph Avenue meets the daily rhythms of student life, its food stations and communal tables drawing undergraduates from every corner of the university. Grab a seat, watch the crowd, and reflect on a campus where the distance between a Nobel Prize winner's office and a freshman's first dining hall breakfast has always been just a few minutes' walk.

Meeting & End Point

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Meeting Point

This tour starts at Corner of Telegraph - Durant. Before arrival, please install the mobile app and use the code provided on your confirmation ticket. Detailed starting point instructions are available after downloading.

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End Point

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Good to Know

Wheelchair accessible
Infants and small children can ride in a pram or stroller
Service animals allowed
Public transportation options are available nearby
Transportation options are wheelchair accessible
All areas and surfaces are wheelchair accessible
Suitable for all physical fitness levels

Known For:

Cultural Tours in Oakland, Historical Tours in Oakland, Walking Tours in Oakland, Private and Luxury in Oakland, Private Sightseeing Tours in Oakland, Audio Guides in Oakland

Special Instructions

VOICEMAP CODE
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Please check your email at the address you provided when you made this booking. You've been sent an eight character code you'll need to redeem your tour.

This code can be used by every member of your party. If you've booked for three people, for example, three people can download this tour using the same code.

DOWNLOAD INSTRUCTIONS

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Once you've received your code, please follow these steps:

Install the VoiceMap Audio Tours mobile app

Create an account

Select Tour Codes from the menu, then select Enter Codes

Enter your code then select Download Now

PLEASE NOTE
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You can download the tour at any time, before or after your booking date. It’s best to download the tour before you set off for the starting point.

This tour follows a set route and includes turn-by-turn directions. It works best if you start it in the right place and follow the directions from one location to the next.

When the download completes, you’ll see a screen with a photo of the starting point and directions to it. The red start button will become active when you are at the starting point.

Remember to bring your own headphones, unless you have booked a driving tour.

SUPPORT
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For technical support and other queries, please email support@voicemap.me