🇺🇸 United States
San Francisco
San Francisco is a city of 873,000 on a peninsula at the mouth of San Francisco Bay on the Pacific Coast of California — one of the world's most recognisable cities, defined by its topography (the 7x7 mile peninsula has 43 hills, including Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Telegraph Hill, Twin Peaks and Potrero Hill — the hills give the city its famous views, its funicular cable cars and its impossibly steep streets), its iconic landmarks (the Golden Gate Bridge, 1937, the most photographed bridge in the world; Alcatraz Island federal penitentiary 1934-1963; the Painted Ladies Victorian houses), and its cultural history as the capital of the American counterculture (the 1906 earthquake and fire, the Beat Generation in North Beach in the 1950s, the 1967 Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury, the 1970s gay liberation movement centred on Castro Street, and the 1990s dot-com boom that transformed the city's demographics). San Francisco is simultaneously one of the most beautiful cities in the United States (the Bay, the hills, the Victorian and Edwardian architecture, the fog rolling through the Golden Gate, the light) and one of the most unequal (the median home price of $1.4 million, the highest-paid tech workers in the world, and the largest homeless encampments of any major American city exist within a few blocks of each other). The city's food culture is the finest in the United States — the sourdough bread (the San Francisco sourdough, leavened with a wild yeast starter culture unique to the Bay Area fog microclimate, which gives it a distinctive tang not reproducible elsewhere), the Dungeness crab season (November-June), the farmers' markets at the Ferry Building, the Mission burritos (the largest stuffed flour tortilla in the world), and the Napa/Sonoma wine country 90 minutes north.