One-Eyed Willy's cave is a soundstage in Burbank, and the pirate ship inside it was built there. Everything above ground is a working port at the mouth of the Columbia River. In The Goonies Astoria plays itself, and the house the story hangs on is still white, still on its hill, and still somebody's home.
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places on the route
Astoria, the coast an hour south, and one address in California. Click a point to jump to its entry.
Where was The Goonies filmed? In Astoria, Oregon; on the coast less than an hour south, at Cannon Beach and Ecola State Park; on one beach in California, at the mouth of the Russian River north of San Francisco; and on Stage 16 at Warner Bros. in Burbank, where the cavern and the ship were built. The Goonies filming locations in Astoria come in two clusters: the house, alone on its hill at the east end of town, and three buildings in the same few blocks downtown, two of them museums and one a working bowling alley. Andy's cheerleading field, also in Astoria, is under a hospital cancer centre. The Fratellis' restaurant was a set built for the film and pulled down afterwards, and the headland it stood on has spent this year being closed and reopened by landslides.
Where does The Goonies take place? In Astoria, the town it was shot in. The Goon Docks of the film is the Uppertown neighbourhood at the east end of town, up the hill from the working waterfront. The production booked every room in the Thunderbird Motel on that waterfront for a month, started shooting on 22 October 1984, and was finished in Oregon by 14 November. The motel is the Astoria Riverwalk Inn now.
The Goonies house
The Walsh house
The house in October 2006, nine years before the crowds and the sign at the bottom of the street.
368 38th Street, Uppertown, Astoria, Oregon. A private home, and there are no tours inside.
The Goonies location people drive up the hill for is somebody's front door. In the film it is Mikey and Brand's house, and the family is about to be evicted from it.
Where is the Goonies house? On a hillside in Uppertown, at the east end of town. The Goonies house address is 368 38th Street, and 38th Street at that point is not a through road at all: it is a gravel drive, and it stops at the house. The house was built in 1896, and it was the main Astoria location of the shoot.
The Goonies house Astoria Oregon has lived with since 1985 is a private home. There is no interior tour, no museum inside, nobody to buy a ticket from. The chamber of commerce names three public places to look at it from: the River Walk between the Safeway and 37th Street, the Columbia Fields ball fields off Highway 30 at 35th, and the pavement on Duane Street. Cars are asked to stay off Duane east of 37th. You may walk up the gravel drive, since it is a city street, but keep to the side so residents can get past, and stay off the porch and out of the neighbours' gardens.
It came apart once, in public. Through the summer of 2015 an estimated twelve to fifteen hundred people a day were coming to the house. In August the city put up a sign at the bottom of the street reading Access closed to Goonies house, and Sandi Preston, who had let fans walk up for fourteen years, ran blue tarpaulin across the front and side of the building to keep them off the porch and away from the windows. The sign settled nothing. Russ Warr, a city councillor, told the council that Monday that the city could suggest people stay off the street and could do no more than suggest it: as long as 38th Street is a city street, it is a public thoroughfare.
The house has changed hands since then. Behman Zakeri, a Goonies fan from Kansas City, bought it and set about making it look like the film again; by the spring of 2025 the Rube Goldberg machine that opens the yard gate after Chunk's truffle shuffle was about half built. Tours of the house were on the programme for the fortieth anniversary weekend that June, only the third time the public has been let inside.
Astoria's chamber of commerce keeps an entire website for this one film. It is not a listing for Astoria or Goonies house so much as a set of instructions: where to stand, where not to drive, what to leave alone, what is no longer there.
Downtown: a jail, a mansion and a bowling alley
The Astoria Goonies locations downtown stand within a couple of hundred metres of one another, in the few blocks between the county courthouse and the river.
The Oregon Film Museum, in the old county jail
The old Clatsop County Jail on Duane Street, now the Oregon Film Museum. The pediment carries both names: OREGON FILM MUSEUM above, COUNTY JAIL 1914 1976 below.
The Fratellis break Jake out of a jail in the first minutes, and the jail was a jail. Clatsop County locked people up in this building from 1914 until 1976, and the pediment still says so: COUNTY JAIL 1914 1976, under the newer line that says OREGON FILM MUSEUM.
There is no Astoria Goonies museum as such. There is the Oregon Film Museum, which opened in the empty jail in 2010 for the film's twenty-fifth anniversary, and whose second gallery is inside the cells themselves. Cell number 2 is where the film keeps a Fratelli.
The building has been a working set three times over: this film, then Short Circuit the year after, then Come See the Paradise in 1990.
The Flavel House Museum
The Captain George Flavel House Museum from Duane Street, with the museum sign on the corner.
Mikey's father is a museum curator, and this is the museum: fifty metres from the jail door, on the other side of Duane Street. It was built in the 1880s for Captain George Flavel, a pilot who guided ships across the Columbia bar. In 1951 there was talk of pulling it down to make a parking lot for the county courthouse; people in town organised to keep it, and that is how it became a museum. It went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. Both it and the old jail are run by the Clatsop County Historical Society.
Chunk is in a bowling alley when the Fratellis go past the window with the police behind them, and the bowling alley is on Marine Drive, two minutes' walk from the jail. It is still a bowling alley. You can walk in and bowl a game, though the hours move about and the alley asks people to ring first.
The field and the dock
Andy's cheerleading practice was filmed at Warren Field, and Warren Field is gone. Columbia Memorial Hospital grew over it and put a cancer centre on the ground, west of the house, and that block is still a building site.
Stef snags her crab at the East End Mooring Basin, the working marina at the east end of the waterfront. The state tourism office names the same marina as one of the places to see the house from, and says nothing about filming there. The house stands on the hillside above the dock, in clear sight of it across the highway, which is what makes the marina a viewpoint.
The beach race at Haystack Rock
Haystack Rock
Haystack Rock from the sand at Cannon Beach. The rock is 235 feet high.
The chase out of town ends on sand. The Fratellis drive into a beach rally, and the rock standing behind the cars is Haystack Rock. Later in the film the kids line the map up against the same rock.
It is 235 feet of basalt sitting on a flat beach, and at low tide you can walk right up to it and find sea stars in the pools around the base. That freedom comes with rules, because the rock is part of the Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge and its tidal zone is one of the state's marine gardens: nothing may be taken from within 300 yards of it, and climbing above the barnacle line is banned outright, to keep people off the nesting birds and the tidepool life.
Cauldron Point is in California
Goat Rock Beach
Arched Rock seen from Goat Rock Beach. It is the rock with the hole through it that stands behind the last scene of the film.
Sonoma Coast State Park, near Jenner, Sonoma County
The Goonies come out of the tunnel at the end onto a beach called Cauldron Point, and the Inferno sails off behind them. That beach is at the mouth of the Russian River on the Sonoma coast, about two hours' drive north of San Francisco. The rock with the hole through it in the background is Arched Rock, and it is still there.
A San Francisco paper went out there and dated the filming to 20 January 1985, with the cast reportedly staying down the coast at Bodega Bay. That last detail is probably where a disagreement comes from. The Oregon Encyclopedia puts the final scene at Bodega Bay itself, and Goat Rock Beach is a separate place further north.
The beach is open, with parking and toilets. Swimming is not an option here and the state park service says so in capital letters. Dogs are not allowed on this beach at all, because a colony of harbour seals uses it, and visitors are asked to stay fifty yards off the seals, especially between March and August when the pups are there. When the surf turns dangerous the gate closes to cars. You can still walk in.
After the beach, the production went to Burbank. One-Eyed Willy's cavern and the Inferno were built on Stage 16 at Warner Bros., one of the largest soundstages in the country. Nothing underground in this film is underground.
The hideout that was never a building
Ecola State Park
The view south from Ecola State Park towards Cannon Beach and Haystack Rock.
Ecola State Park, Cannon Beach: nine miles of coast around Tillamook Head, between Seaside and Cannon Beach
The kids come out of the trees with the map, high over the ocean, and this is the coast they are looking down on. The park has other credits: Indian Beach, inside it, stood in for Bells Beach in Australia in the last act of Point Break, Twilight worked on the same sand, and a school picnic in Kindergarten Cop was shot somewhere in the park.
Somewhere up here stood the Fratellis' restaurant, the one with the hideout under it. It was a replica of an abandoned restaurant, put up for the film, and it was pulled down afterwards. If you drive up there looking for it, there is nothing to find.
What has changed here since the shoot has nothing to do with films. Ecola Point had a viewing deck, and the state took it out because the ground underneath stopped being stable. Landslides after the winter storms closed the entire park from December 2025 until 7 April 2026. Twelve days after it reopened, another slide shut the west section of the Clatsop Loop, including the Lighthouse Trail, from south of Hiker's Camp to north of Indian Beach. That slide was still moving when the closure went up, and no reopening date came with it.
Whether any of it is open as you read this, we do not know.
