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 Astoria, under its own name, and the house the story hangs on is still white, still on its hill, and still somebody's home.
7
places on the route
Four points in Astoria, two on the coast an hour south, one 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, more than five hundred miles from the rest of it; and on Stage 16 at Warner Bros. in Burbank, where the cavern and the ship were built. The Goonies filming locations below sort themselves not by distance but by whether you can get in: a house nobody enters, museum doors that open, a bowling alley, a sports field with a hospital building on it now, and a restaurant that was taken down as soon as the shoot ended. The headland that restaurant stood on has spent this year being closed and reopened by landslides.
Where does The Goonies take place? In Astoria, which is named on screen. 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 at the east end of town, not quite two miles from the county courthouse. 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 Oregon Encyclopedia, published by Portland State University and the Oregon Historical Society, dates the building to 1896 and calls it the primary 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. In the summer of 2015 the count at the top of the street was twelve to fifteen hundred people a day. In August the city put up a sign at the bottom of it reading Access closed to Goonies house, and the owner covered the front of the building with a blue tarpaulin. The sign settled nothing. The city manager said at the time that the city could ask people not to walk there and could not stop them: 38th Street is a city street, and a city street is a public thoroughfare.
The house has changed hands since then. The new owner has let the public in a handful of times, and when it opened for the film's fortieth anniversary in April 2025, the local paper counted that as only the third occasion.
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. It is also the only source we have for two of the places below.
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. Two of them share a street name with the house: the museum is at 732 Duane, and the pavement people are asked to photograph the house from is Duane at the other end of town.
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.
Photo: Gary Halvorson, Oregon State Archives · CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
The cell block inside. The jail held prisoners from 1914 to 1976; the cells are now museum galleries.
Photo: Jeff Hitchcock from Seattle, WA, USA · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
732 Duane Street
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 the one that appears in the film.
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 museum says so about itself, and the state tourism office says the same thing separately.
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. It has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1951. 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 Oregon Encyclopedia puts the alley beside the jail and the Flavel House among the Astoria places this film used, and the chamber of commerce is the one source that says what the scene is. The open encyclopedia entry that carries the film's production notes does not mention the place at all.
The field and the dock
Two other Astoria places in this film get no pin on our map.
Andy's cheerleading practice was filmed at John Warren Field, and Warren Field is gone: the hospital expanded across it and put a cancer centre on the ground, about a mile west of the house. The chamber is the only source that says so, and we looked for a second without finding one.
At the East End Mooring Basin the two strongest sources we have describe the same dock differently. The chamber says Stef caught her crab off it. The state tourism office names the same marina as one of the places to see the house from, and says nothing about filming there. Both can be true at once, and there is a reason the second one works: the dock sits four hundred metres below the house, in clear sight of it.
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.
Plenty of films get attached to this rock. The city of Cannon Beach names one of them besides this one, Kindergarten Cop. Four more titles travel with it in the usual lists, and the footnotes under those lists lead to location-spotting websites rather than to anyone who was on the beach.
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 more than five hundred miles south of Astoria, at the mouth of the Russian River, about two hours 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; the paper, an encyclopedia entry and a location guide all put it at Goat Rock Beach, which is a separate place further north, and that is where our pin is.
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.
Haystack Rock and the offshore rocks from Ecola Point, photographed in 2019. The viewing deck at that point has since been taken out: the ground under it stopped being stable.
Ecola State Park, Cannon Beach: nine miles of coast around Tillamook Head, between Seaside and Cannon Beach
The kids come out of the trees high above the ocean with the map, and the coast they are standing over is this one. The park has other credits as well: Indian Beach, inside it, stood in for Bells Beach in Australia in the last act of Point Break, and Twilight worked on the same sand. A school picnic in Kindergarten Cop was filmed in the park, and that one has the state film trail behind it; the other two rest on a single list.
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. It stood for the length of the shoot and not much longer. 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. The reports in April called that slide active and gave no date for reopening.
Whether any of it is open as you read this, we do not know. The Oregon parks service's own pages would not load for us at all this month, and the newest reading we have of the park is a copy saved in December 2025, before the winter that shut it. We are not going to tell you a coast is open on the strength of that.
