Visitors to Balboa Park often comment on the striking statue of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa that stands roughly midway between the Spreckels Organ Pavilion and the San Diego Museum of Art. The only problem is — it’s not Balboa.
It might make sense for the park to contain a heroic, oversized representation of the first European expedition leader to lay eyes on the Pacific Ocean near the Isthmus of Panama. According to one researcher, San Diego’s city fathers wanted to commission such a tribute after Balboa’s name was picked to replace the prosaic “City Park” moniker when the site was being readied for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. (The expo celebrated the long-awaited opening of the Panama Canal.) But money for a public sculpture wasn’t available at the time.
More than a dozen years passed before a deep-pocketed benefactor stepped up with an offer. He was Archer M. Huntington, son of California railroad magnate Collis P. and cousin to Henry Edward Huntington (who gave Pasadena its magnificent library). Archer was a lover of Spanish art and architecture, and when he saw the plans for San Diego’s Spanish Renaissance-style Fine Arts Building, he offered to pony up the funds not only for a library within it but also for a statue of the legendary Spanish warrior El Cid, to be erected in front of the art museum. Archer’s wife Anna, a celebrated sculptress, had just created such a work, and the Huntingtons gave one replica of it to the city of Sevilla in Spain. A second went to the New York-based American Hispanic Society, which Archer had founded. The philanthropic couple sent a third replica to a 1929 Exhibition of American Sculpture in San Francisco, but once that ended, the six-ton statue was moved to its current location in Balboa Park.
It was installed on a 14-foot-tall Indiana limestone base designed by William Templeton Johnson, the Fine Arts Building’s architect, and pomp and speechifying marked the statue’s official debut on July 5, 1930. After delivering a florid tribute, the Spanish ambassador to the United States (sent by the King of Spain to honor the occasion), pulled a cord designed to unveil the art work. But the cloth got caught on El Cid’s brandished spear, and two young boys in the crowd had to be recruited to scramble up and free the tangle. 
Since then the statue has endured other minor occasional indignities. Teenagers have painted it, and when the Navy occupied the park during World War II, officers (oblivious to the protective value of the patina) ordered that its brass be polished to a shine.
The statue also faced the threat of some competition in the early 1990s, when arts patron Elizabeth North offered to commission a sculpture of Balboa and donate it for placement within the park. But critics of the offer charged that Balboa was a brutal mass murderer unworthy of glorification. Others protested the scale of the proposed design. Squabbling over where to put any Balboa statue also helped to derail the Balboa project, but North ultimately wound up donating the money to fund the lovely fountain that now graces the plaza in front of the museum.
