Belmont Shore is the most pleasant of Long Beach's beach neighbourhoods — a narrow peninsula running east from Alamitos Bay with a walkable strip of restaurants, bars, and shops along 2nd Street and a sandy beach on the ocean side. The scale is right: 2nd Street is about eight blocks long, which makes it easy to cover on foot and gives it a village feel that the larger waterfront lacks.
The beach at Belmont Shore is a proper sand beach with a volleyball culture and good swimming in summer. The bay side is calmer and ideal for paddleboarding and kayaking — rental places are easy to find. The residential streets behind 2nd Street are worth wandering: early twentieth-century bungalows on narrow lots, several of them with boats parked out front. The area fills up on summer weekends, so arriving by bicycle or on the Metro Blue Line is often smarter than driving.