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.
The Golden Gate Bridge (1937, Chief Engineer Joseph Strauss, 2,737 m total length, 227 m towers — the tallest in the world at opening; "International Orange" paint chosen to be visible in fog; the 4-year construction killed 11 workers, remarkable for the era; the pedestrian walkway is open daily; the view from the bridge is the most famous urban panorama in the US: the Bay, the city skyline, Alcatraz island, Angel Island and the Marin Headlands) — walk the 1.7 km east sidewalk from the south (SF) to the Marin side and back; the Battery Spencer viewpoint on the Marin side (just north of the bridge) is the finest angle for photographing the bridge with the city behind it.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideAlcatraz Island (1.5 km offshore in San Francisco Bay — 12 minutes by ferry from Pier 33; the federal penitentiary operated 1934-1963, housing 1,576 prisoners total including Al Capone, George "Machine Gun" Kelly, and Robert Stroud the Birdman; 36 escape attempts, 23 men involved, 6 shot and killed, 2 drowned, 5 listed as missing and presumed drowned — no confirmed successful escape in 29 years of operation; the most famous attempt: the June 1962 Frank Morris and Anglin brothers tunnel escape using spoons and a drill assembled from a stolen vacuum cleaner motor; the audio tour narrated by former guards and prisoners is the finest self-guided museum experience in the US).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuidePier 39 (the tourist pier at Fisherman's Wharf) has a resident colony of California sea lions (K-Dock — the sea lions arrived in January 1990, one month after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and have been resident since; the colony ranges from 300 to 1,700 individuals depending on season; the bark is audible from 100 m; the males fight for dock position; the smell is strong and distinctive — this is one of the finest urban wildlife viewing experiences in the US); the sourdough bread bowl (the San Francisco Boudin sourdough, made since 1849 with the same mother starter culture, served as a hollow bowl filled with clam chowder — the defining tourist food of Fisherman's Wharf).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe San Francisco Dungeness crab season (Cancer magister, the Pacific coast crab; commercial season November 15 to June 30 in California; the crab is available fresh from the crab pots on Jefferson Street at Fisherman's Wharf in season; a 2-lb Dungeness crab at a wharf stall — cracked for you, served with sourdough and drawn butter — is the essential SF seafood experience) or the Mission burrito (the Mission District's invention: a giant flour tortilla the size of a small forearm wrapped around rice, beans, cheese, salsa, sour cream and your choice of protein — the definitive SF street food, eaten standing or sitting on a sidewalk stool).
The San Francisco cable cars (1873, invented by Andrew Hallidie — the world's first mechanical urban transit system; 3 remaining lines: Powell-Hyde, Powell-Mason and California Street; the cable runs continuously beneath the street at 9.5 mph; the grip man uses a mechanical grip to clamp onto or release the moving cable; the system is a UNESCO Mechanical Engineering Landmark and a National Historic Landmark) — the Powell-Hyde line is the most scenic: from Powell and Market (with its historic cable car turntable operated by hand by the conductors) over Nob Hill, down the steep Russian Hill grade to the Lombard Street switchbacks and Ghirardelli Square.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideSan Francisco Chinatown (24 blocks — the oldest Chinatown in North America, established 1848, the centre of Chinese-American life for 150 years; the Dragon Gate at Grant Avenue and Bush Street; the fortune cookie (invented in San Francisco, not China — first made by Japanese-American Makoto Hagiwara at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park in 1914; the fortune cookie is unknown in China)); then North Beach (the Italian neighbourhood adjacent to Chinatown, the Beat Generation capital: City Lights Bookstore — the bookshop founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953 that published Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" in 1956, sparking one of the most important obscenity trials in American literary history).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideHaight-Ashbury (the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets, 3 km west of downtown) is the neighbourhood where the 1967 Summer of Love (100,000 young Americans descending on San Francisco in the summer of 1967, drawn by the promise of free music, free food, free love and psychedelic drugs — the Grateful Dead at 710 Ashbury, Janis Joplin around the corner, Jefferson Airplane on Fulton Street, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park) permanently changed American culture; the neighbourhood retains its counterculture character (vintage clothing shops, headshops, independent bookstores) at the junction that TIME Magazine called "the vibrating epicentre of the hippie movement."
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe Castro (the Castro Street neighbourhood, 4 km west of downtown, the most famous LGBTQ+ neighbourhood in the United States and the symbolic heart of the global gay rights movement) has the Harvey Milk Plaza (commemorating the first openly gay elected official in California, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, assassinated 1978 by former colleague Dan White), the Castro Theatre (1922, the finest single-screen movie palace in the US still operating as an independent arthouse cinema), and the Castro Camera shop where Milk ran his political campaigns; Milk's story was told in Gus Van Sant's film "Milk" (2008, Sean Penn).
The Ferry Building Marketplace (the 1898 Beaux-Arts ferry terminal on the Embarcadero, restored 2003 as an artisan food market) with the Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday farmers' market (consistently rated the best in the United States) has the finest produce in California: Acme Bread (the Bay Area sourdough pioneer), Cowgirl Creamery (the farmhouse cheeses that redefined American artisan dairy — the Mt Tam triple-cream, the Red Hawk washed-rind), Hog Island Oysters (the Tomales Bay oysters from 60 km north, served at the oyster bar with mignonette), local honey, heritage vegetables, and the Marin Organic peach stand in August.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideGolden Gate Park (412 hectares — larger than Central Park in New York, built on sand dunes starting in 1870 by engineer William Hammond Hall; the Japanese Tea Garden, 1894, the oldest Japanese garden in the US; the de Young Museum of art, the California Academy of Sciences — a natural history museum with a living coral reef aquarium, a rainforest biodome and an observatory under a 2.5-acre living roof of native plants; the National AIDS Memorial Grove in the Middle Lake area; the bison paddock in the western end — American bison have been in Golden Gate Park since 1892); the Sunday car-free Great Highway and JFK Drive.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe Painted Ladies (the six Victorian houses at 710-720 Steiner Street, Alamo Square — the "Postcard Row" with the SF downtown skyline behind them; built 1894-1895, repainted in polychromatic Victorian colours in the 1960s-70s; featured in the opening credits of the TV show "Full House"; the most photographed group of Victorian houses in the United States) and the Alamo Square Park (the hilltop park with the finest free panoramic view of the downtown skyline, the Bay, and the Castro neighbourhood) at the golden hour (the San Francisco afternoon light, when the fog burns off and the western sun illuminates the Victorian facades).
The Mission District (the largely Latino neighbourhood south of the Castro, the oldest neighbourhood in San Francisco — Mission Dolores, 1776, the 6th California mission and the oldest standing structure in San Francisco, is here) with the Mission murals (the Balmy Alley and Clarion Alley outdoor murals — the densest concentration of murals in the US after Detroit; the 1970s Chicano muralist movement that created the Mission mural tradition is one of the most important public art movements in 20th-century America) and the Mission burrito from La Taqueria or El Farolito (the two landmark Mission burrito spots, endlessly debated by SF residents as the finest in the city).