Population: 775,000 (7 million in the San Francisco Bay Area, including 400,000 in Oakland, 100,000 in Berkeley and 895,000 in San Jose)
Area: 49 sq mi (127 sq km)
Elevation: 155ft (45m)
State: California
Time Zone: Pacific Time (GMT/UTC -8)
Telephone area codes: San Francisco and Marin County 415; Oakland and Berkeley 510; the Peninsula 650; Wine Country 707; San Jose and Santa Cruz 408

Orientation

San Francisco covers the tip of a 30mi (50km) peninsula in Northern California, with the Pacific Ocean on its western side and the San Francisco Bay to the north and east. San Francisco is just one of many cities in the Bay Area; others include Oakland (east across the Bay Bridge), Berkeley (just north of Oakland) and San Jose (an hour's drive southeast of San Francisco, near the southern tip of the bay). Marin County and the Wine Country lie to the north, across the Golden Gate Bridge.

The most touristed part of the city resembles a slice of pie, with Van Ness Ave and Market St making the two sides and the Embarcadero the round edge of the pie. The steaming toppings of this homebaked slice are the classy shops around Union Square, the highrise Financial District, the classy Civic Center, the down-and-out but up-and-coming Tenderloin, swanky Nob Hill and Russian Hill, Chinatown, North Beach and the epicenter of tourist kitsch, Fisherman's Wharf. To the south of Market St lies SoMa, an upwardly mobile warehouse zone of clubs and bars that fades in the southwest into the Mission - the city's Latino quarter - and then the Castro, the center of gay life.

The vast swathe from Van Ness Ave west to the Pacific Ocean encompasses upscale neighborhoods like the Marina and Pacific Heights, ethnically diverse zones like the Richmond and Sunset districts as well as the self-conscious timewarp of Haight-Ashbury. Three of the city's great parklands - the Presidio, Lincoln Park and Golden Gate Park - are also in this area.

San Francisco
When to Go

San Francisco is a popular location any time of the year. Summer is the prime tourist season, so prices are higher, lines are longer and finding a parking place is about as easy as working out what to wear to the Folsom Street Fair. San Francisco's summer weather is none too hospitable anyway: the bay is often foggy, while inland or north in the Wine Country it's often too hot and dusty for comfort. Local weather patterns are highly unpredictable, but generally the best months weather-wise are between mid-September and mid-November.

Events

If you like partying and dress-ups, San Francisco could be just the ticket. Chinese New Year (late January/early February) is celebrated in Chinatown with color and verve similar to Chinese centers in Asia. In late April, Cherry Blossom Festival is celebrated in Japantown with martial arts demos, tea ceremonies and other Japanese events. Also in April is San Francisco's International Film Festival, the oldest in the USA. On the third Sunday in May, over 100,000 joggers take part in the Bay to Breakers run, many of them in silly costume (and sometimes in nothing at all).

June is a celebratory month for San Francisco's gay community, with a film festival and Gay Pride Week leading up to the last Sunday in June, when the outrageous Gay Freedom Day Parade is held. The evening before the parade is the Dyke March and the Pink Saturday party on Castro St, attended by up to half a million people. Carnaval is celebrated in the Mission district over Memorial Day weekend in May.

Stern Grove, a woodsy park in the Sunset district, teems with music lovers on weekends during its free June-through-August concert series. Cable car drivers compete to be the loudest or most tuneful in the late June/early July Cable Car Bell-Ringing Championship. September is chock full of festivals: there's free Opera in the Park, free Shakespeare performances, a blues festival and the Folsom St Fair, the sexiest S&M street fair in the city. San Francisco really turns it on for Halloween (31 October): this may be the most crazed night of the year, with hundreds of thousands of costumed revelers taking to the streets, particularly Castro St.

Public holidays
January 1 - New Year's Day
third Monday in January - Martin Luther King Jr Day
third Monday in February - Presidents' Day
March/April - Easter
last Monday in May - Memorial Day
July 4 - Independence Day
first Monday in September - Labor Day
second Monday in October - Columbus Day
November 11 - Veterans Day
fourth Thursday in November - Thanksgiving
December 25 - Christmas Day

San Francisco Attractions
Downtown

San Francisco's densely populated downtown is squeezed into the hilly northeastern corner of the peninsula. The often dramatic cityscape came about because the streets were laid out as if their planners had never so much as glanced at the city's topography. They simply dropped a grid pattern onto the steeply undulating terrain, and the result is that streets often climb or drop at ridiculously steep gradients. It makes parking hazardous, breeds bicycle messengers of superhuman strength and provides a hairy setting for car chase scenes in movies.

Union Square is San Francisco's downtown tourist center. It's a mishmash of glitzy shops and hotels, flower vendors and homeless people. Cable cars rumble down the west side of the square; try looking down Hyde St towards Aquatic Park, down Washington St to Chinatown and the Financial District, or down California St from Nob Hill. And if you're in Nob Hill, you've just got to ride the elevator to the Top of the Mark, the famous view bar at the top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel. SoMa ('South of Market St') is a combination of lofty office buildings spilling over from the Financial District, fancy condos along the Embarcadero, a touristy gallery and museum precinct around Yerba Buena Gardens and the late night entertainment scene along Folsom and 11th Sts.

Chinatown

A few blocks north of Union Square is Chinatown, the most densely packed pocket of the city and one of its most colorful. The tacky curio shops along Grant Avenue are monuments to the role tourism plays in the neighborhood, but the 30,000 Chinese - most of whom speak Cantonese as their first language - live in a tightly knit, distinctly un-Western community. It's a great place for casual wandering through narrow alleys, where on quiet afternoons you can hear the clack of mah jongg tiles from behind screen doors. The most colorful time to visit Chinatown is during the Chinese New Year in late January or early February, with a parade and fireworks and other festivities.

North Beach

North Beach is sandwiched between Chinatown and Fisherman's Wharf. It's a lively stretch of strip joints, bars, cafes and restaurants that started as the city's Italian quarter and gave birth to the Beats in the 1950s - City Lights Bookstore is here, at the corner of Columbus Ave and Jack Kerouac Alley. The neighborhood is hemmed in on the east by Telegraph Hill, which features tree-shaded stairways that ramble down the steep eastern face of the hill, and Coit Tower. One of the city's most famous landmarks, the tower is a prime spot to let loose your postcard-vista voyeurism. The 360° views from here are superb.

Fisherman's Wharf

The much-maligned but massively popular Fisherman's Wharf is directly north of Russian Hill. There's no getting away from the Wharf's unspeakable kitschiness, but it's still fun. Packed with shopping centers, hokey museums and countless accommodations, it's also the gateway for several top attractions (Alcatraz, the Maritime Museum and the Historic Ships Pier). Pier 39 is the area's focal point - it's become as popular with a colony of sea lions as it is with tourists.

Haight-Ashbury

Keep on truckin' southwest of downtown and you'll hit Haight-Ashbury ('the Haight'), the locus of San Francisco's brief fling as the home of flower power in the late 1960s. Today, the Haight is still colorful, but its pretty Victorian houses and proximity to Golden Gate Park have prompted increasing gentrification. The compact Castro, to the southeast, is the gay center of San Francisco and one of the best neighborhoods for strolling and watching the streetlife.

Golden Gate Park

Golden Gate Park stretches almost halfway across the 6mi (10km) wide peninsula, from the Pacific Ocean to the Haight's Panhandle. Apart from gardens (including a flower conservatory and a charming Japanese tea garden), lakes (rowboats, pedal boats and motor boats can all be rented), sporting facilities (including horse riding, archery, softball, golf, lawn bowling, horseshoe pitching and petanque), the park also has a host of museums and an aquarium, making it a useful escape even when the fog rolls in and the temperature plummets.

The city has plenty of other wide open spaces. Lincoln Park Coastal Trail is an interesting walk from the ruins of the Sutro Baths at Ocean Beach to the northwestern tip of the city, known as Lands End; there are some great views of the ocean and the Golden Gate Bridge. South of Golden Gate Park, the city's hilly terrain makes its final skyward lunges at Twin Peaks and Mt Sutro. The 900ft (270m) summit of Twin Peaks offers a superb viewpoint over the whole Bay Area, especially at night. There are viewpoints at both ends of the Golden Gate Bridge, but Vista Point, the northern one, not only gives you the bridge, but the San Francisco skyline as well.

San Francisco Bay

San Francisco's bay is curiously shy. It always seems to be around the corner, glimpsed in the distance, seen from afar. It is spanned by bridges, surrounded by cities and suede hills, dotted with sails and crisscrossed by fast-moving ferries. The bay is the largest inlet on the California coast, stretching about 60mi (100km) in length and up to 12mi (20km) in width.

The beautiful Golden Gate Bridge crosses the 2mi (3km) mouth of the bay. Completed in 1937, the bridge remains the symbol of the city despite competition from modern constructions. At the time of its completion, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world and the 746ft (224m) suspension towers were higher than any structure west of New York City. The Bay Bridge, connecting San Francisco and Oakland, is five times as long as the Golden Gate Bridge, carries far more traffic and predates it by six months, but it's never had the same iconic fame.

The bay's other attractions include Alcatraz Island, which operated as an 'escape-proof' prison from 1933 to 1963. Al Capone, 'Machine Gun' Kelly and Robert Stroud, the 'birdman of Alcatraz,' were among the prison's unsavory residents. North of Alcatraz, Angel Island served as an internment camp during WWII; it's now a popular place for walking, hiking, biking, picnics and camping. Both islands are accessible by ferry from Fisherman's Wharf and the Embarcadero.

San Francisco Off the Beaten Track
Marin County

Across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, Marin County is wealthy, laid back and right in tune with every trend that comes by. From hot tubs and cocaine to New Age spiritualism, mountain biking and designer pizzas, Marin was there first. It's a wonderfully varied peninsula with fiercely expensive Sausalito on the bay side and the wild Pacific coastline stretching north to popular Stinson Beach, hideaway Bolinas and fog-swept Point Reyes National Seashore, which is the best spot in the Bay Area for whale watching.

Between bay and ocean, the central hills rise to the 2600ft (770m) peak of Mt Tamalpais, overlooking the redwood stand of Muir Woods. The view from Mt Tam is a breathtaking 360° panorama of ocean, bay, cities, bridges and hills. Over 200mi (320km) of hiking and biking trails wind around the mountain, and deer, fox, bobcat and even the occasional mountain lion dwell in the forests and dells.

You're in Marin once you're over the Golden Gate Bridge: Highway 101 cuts directly through the region; Highway 1 branches off at Mill Valley and heads to the coast. Plenty of buses run from San Francisco; there are also ferries from Fisherman's Wharf to Sausalito, Larkspur and Tiburon.

Wine Country

Northern California's glorious Wine Country is a feasible day trip from San Francisco, but an overnight stay will give you a much better taste of the vineyards and circumvent any 'who's gonna drive' conversations. Only about 5% of Californian wine comes from the Wine Country, but it's the quality stuff; plonk ordinaire is churned out by the barrel in the Central Valley. The best time to visit is autumn harvest, when the grapes are on the vine, or in spring, when the hills are brilliant green.

The two valleys, Napa and Sonoma, lie between 60 and 90 minutes' drive north of San Francisco. Both offer the same rustic beauty of vineyards, wildflowers, and green and golden hills, but the characters of the valleys are quite different. Napa Valley, further inland, has 200 or more wineries, many of them with gorgeous gardens, knock-out views, interesting architecture and art collections. Of particular note is Stag's Leap Winery, famous for its 1973 cabernet sauvignon that beat the French in a blind tasting in Paris. Calistoga, a spa town in northern Napa, is probably the most attractive option for overnighting. Sonoma Valley is low key and less commercial, with only about 30 wineries. Happily, free tastings are still the norm in Sonoma Valley.

You pretty much need a car to get to and around the Wine Country, though with planning, patience and picnics you may negotiate the bus system. Bicycle riding is an increasingly popular way to wobble from winery to winery, or if you just don't trust yourself to forgo that fifth glass of cabernet, it's possible to slaver over the valley from above, either by hot air balloon or glider.

Oakland

Head across the Bay Bridge to Oakland, the largest city in the East Bay. There's nothing dazzling about downtown Oakland, but amid the slightly decrepit buildings there are a few treasures, such as the mosaic-fronted 1931 Paramount Theater, home of Oakland's ballet and symphony, and the abandoned 1928 Fox Oakland Theater, an Art Deco beauty. Oakland's untouristy Chinatown is focused on Franklin and Webster Sts. Jack London Square is a converted industrial zone on the waterfront now stuffed with restaurants; in the neighboring Jack London Village, the Jack London Museum has exhibits about the native author. Downtown Oakland's visual centerpiece is Lake Merritt, an artificial estuary that was the nation's first wildlife refuge. The nearby Oakland Museum's terrific collection focuses on California art and history and the state's endangered ecosystems. Get there by train, on the Richmond or Pittsburg/Bay Point line, by AC Transit bus from San Francisco's Transbay Terminal or drive over the Bay Bridge and take the I-880 to downtown Oakland.

Berkeley

Erstwhile seat of radical student politics, Berkeley has mellowed since its 1960s heyday but is still considered a mecca of liberalism and the bizarre. Located just over the border north of Oakland and centered around the oldest of the University of California campuses, Berkeley sprawls from the bay all the way to the crest of the East Bay hills. Telegraph Ave is the center of Berkeley's colorful student zone, where street vendors hawk their tie-dyed wares among mohawked urban urchins and streetcorner proselytizers. From Telegraph Ave, the beautiful campus is entered via Sproul Plaza, a center for people-watching and drum-circle jamming. Also of interest on campus is Sather Tower, the 300ft (100m) campanile modeled on St Mark's in Venice.

Oakland and Berkeley are both a quick BART ride from San Francisco. You can also take a ferry from San Francisco to Oakland's Jack London Square or hop a bus, taxi or (during commute hours) a ride-share across the Bay Bridge. You'll want a car (or a meaty set of biking legs) to get into the hills behind the cities.

San Francisco
Activities

San Franciscans are an energetic lot, and there are plenty of opportunities to burn calories even within the city limits. A glance over the sail-dotted bay would suggest this is prime sailing and windsurfing country, but it's not the easiest stretch of water to navigate, and much of the year the wind can be as chilly as going the full dunk. None of the 'California girl' visions apply to San Francisco: ocean swimming is never very pleasant, and the treacherous surf at Ocean Beach is only for the hardy. Walking and sunbathing are the most popular waterside activities. Jogging is also popular beachside and in the city's parks. In-line skating and cycling rule supreme in Golden Gate Park, where you can also play just about any sport you can think of - anyone for petanque?

San Francisco
History

Remarkably, the first European visitors to the San Francisco Bay Area missed the massive inlet altogether. In 1579, Sir Francis Drake landed at Point Reyes, about 35mi (60km) north of San Francisco, claiming it for Queen Elizabeth and then sailing south straight past the Golden Gate. Not long after, Spanish explorers renamed the Point Reyes bay (now known as Drakes Bay) La Bahia de San Francisco, but then proceeded to wreck their ship on Point Reyes and had to crawl south to the safety of Acapulco in a vessel lashed together from the wreckage. They too failed to notice the San Francisco Bay. Its European discovery had to wait nearly another 200 years.

In 1775, Juan Manuel de Ayala became the first European to enter the Golden Gate. He was followed in 1776 by Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, who built a presidio (fort) above the Golden Gate and the Mission Dolores in the heart of today's Mission district. A tiny village known as Yerba Buena sprang up between the two and became the birthplace of modern San Francisco. Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco in 1847, just before a momentous discovery was made in the Sierra Nevada mountains to the east: there was gold in them thar hills. The news was soon out, and prospectors began to flood in; over 100,000 hardy '49ers (the year they made their voyage) endured the long overland trek or the dangerous sea voyage to San Francisco, and the city's population exploded from 500 to 25,000 within a year. In 1850, California became the 31st state in the union, and by 1854 the booming gold-rush town already had more than 500 saloons and 20 theaters to entertain the hard-spending miners.

The initial gold rush fever had subsided by 1859, when a second rush took place, this time for the even richer wealth of the silver Comstock Lode near Reno, Nevada. The late 1870s saw the boom years of the gold and silver rushes dry up; nevertheless, the city grew steadily, and at the turn of the century the population was approaching 350,000. The Spanish-American War in 1898 and the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada's Yukon in 1896 underlined the city's importance as a port, while the opening of numerous banks established its continuing importance as a financial center. Then the 'Big One' brought a severe shake up.

There had been major earthquakes in San Francisco in 1812 and 1865, but the Big One of 18 May 1906 is estimated to have come in at around 8.3 on the Richter Scale (which had not, at that time, been invented), a magnitude still unmatched in California history. The quake was centered near Point Reyes, but it was not the quake itself that was to devastate San Francisco. The real damage came from the fires - lit by toppling chimneys and fed by fractured gas mains - that swept across the city. Water mains had fractured too, so by the time the conflagration had burned itself out, half the city was in ruins. A decade of frantic rebuilding followed the quake, and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition saw the city bigger and brighter than ever.

San Francisco suffered through the Great Depression, and enormous public works projects attempted to yank the economy out of the doldrums. Two of the most prominent, the Bay Bridge of 1936 and the Golden Gate Bridge of 1937, are still magnificent symbols of the area. During WWII, the Bay Area became a major launching pad for military operations in the Pacific, with gigantic shipyards springing up around the bay, breathing more life into the local economy.

From the days of the Gold Rush, San Francisco had always been a freewheeling, hell-raising city - so much so that during the latter half of the 1800s, it became known as the Barbary Coast for its debauched resemblance to the pirate-plagued coast of North Africa. But it wasn't until the mid-1950s that national attention was first focused on 'the City' as the birthplace of a scene of its own. When Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, upstart students at Columbia University, and Gregory Corso, 17 years old and fresh out of jail, fled the indifference of New York City and joined forces with a San Francisco poets' movement begun by poet and literary critic Kenneth Rexroth, the Beat Generation was given a voice. Kerouac became their premier author, Ginsberg their poet, and cool jazz the sound of North Beach, hub of the new Bohemia.

Hippies followed in the 1960s, and the Haight-Ashbury bloomed as the new hotspot. Local bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane set the tune for the movement, and when 20,000 people congregated in Golden Gate Park for a free concert in 1967, the 'Summer of Love' was born. While hippies in the Haight dropped acid and wore flowers in their hair, Berkeley revolutionaries were leading worldwide student upheavals, slugging it out with the cops and the university administration over civil rights. Neighboring Oakland was the scene for yet more revolution, as Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale headed the Black Panthers, the most militant group of the black power movement.

A homosexual revolution followed in the 1970s, as San Francisco's gays stepped decisively out of the closet and slammed the door shut behind them. The 1977 election of gay activist Harvey Milk to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors brought recognition of the gay rights movement to a new peak, but the euphoria was to be short lived. The following year, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, an avowedly anti-gay former police officer and supervisor. Their deaths and the emergence of the first cases of AIDS - at the time thought of as a 'gay cancer' - marked the beginning of the end of the heyday. The rainbow banners and lavender triangles are as common today as they were 20 years ago, but the extravagance of the 1970s now resurfaces mainly at the Castro and Folsom St Fairs and the annual Gay & Lesbian Freedom Day parade.

San Francisco's second 'Big One,' the Loma Prieta earthquake, came at 5:04 pm on October 17, 1989, and measured 7.1 on the Richter scale. Sixty-seven people died in all, but the damage would have been far worse were it not for a baseball game. That year, baseball's World Series was a local affair between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A's. When the quake struck, the game was about to begin at San Francisco's Candlestick Park and a large chunk of the Bay Area population was at home watching it on TV, not out on the freeways stuck in rush-hour traffic.

In the decade since the quake, the Bay Area experienced another period of urban renewal, with a building boom that spruced up neighborhoods and historic buildings across the region, making it an increasingly expensive place to live. The New Media boom - launched in Silicon Valley but at its artistic cutting edge in San Francisco - lured technologically savvy entrepreneurs to the 'Citee by the Bay.' But the dot-com boom was destined to go bust, and shortly after the turn of the millennium the industry indeed took an awkward swan dive - although not before billions of dollars had changed hands. San Francisco's history has always been one of vital cultural waves and cold-hearted economic surges, booms and recessions, and the first decade of the new century is no different - the waves of changes just keep on rolling in.

San Francisco
Getting There & Away

The Bay Area has three major airports: San Francisco International Airport (SFO), Oakland International Airport (OAK) and San Jose International Airport (SJC). Most international flights use San Francisco (at Oakland and San Jose, 'international' mostly means Mexico and Canada), but all three are important domestic gateways, so you should have little trouble finding a flight or connection to just about anywhere on the continent. Departure tax is included in the ticket price.

From San Francisco International Airport, on the western edge of the bay, 14mi (22km) south of the city center, the simplest way to get to the city is by shuttle vans, the Airporter bus, taxis, rental cars and, from early 2003, the extended BART system. There are also bus-BART combinations, which are useful if you're heading to the East Bay. From Oakland International Airport, 8mi (13km) south of downtown Oakland, shuttle buses run between the airport and the Oakland Coliseum BART station, as well as into town, and there are taxis and private shuttles. San Jose International Airport, at the southern end of the bay, is a few miles north of downtown San Jose and just over an hour's drive from San Francisco. A free shuttle bus links the airport with a light rail system that runs to downtown San Jose. The easiest way to get from San Jose to San Francisco is to catch the 80-minute Caltrain service.

Although a variety of bus companies have services between other Bay Area communities and San Francisco, Greyhound is the only regular long-distance bus company operating in the region. Their buses arrive and depart at the Transbay Terminal in SoMa. As an alternative to Greyhound, try the funky Green Tortoise bus line, a favorite of backpackers because it manages to combine getting there with enjoying yourself along the way.

Amtrak is the US national train system, and its Bay Area terminal is at Jack London Square in Oakland. A free shuttle bus connects with San Francisco's Caltrain station and the Ferry Building at the Embarcadero. Traveling north from Los Angeles, it's equally simple to transfer to Caltrain at San Jose and take that service to San Francisco. Amtrak's main Bay Area routes are the San Joaquin (Oakland - Bakersfield), the Three Capitols (San Jose - Oakland - Sacramento) and the Coast Starlight (Seattle - Oakland - San Jose - Los Angeles).

Freeways crisscross the Bay Area, and once you're outside of the city you'll be glad to have a car. Highway 101 runs south to Los Angeles and north to Oregon, but its bayside stretch is a continuous traffic jam - sometimes stationary, sometimes high-speed, but always solid. Interstate 280, parallel and slightly to the west, is much more attractive and easier on the nerves. Highway 1 is the slow but scenic coast route. On the east side of the bay, Interstate 80 runs across the Bay Bridge north through Berkeley and inland through Sacramento, the state capital, on its way to ReÛno, Nevada. Interstate 580 swings inland from the East Bay to meet Interstate 5, the fastest route south to Los Angeles; the trip takes 6 or 7 boring hours. The 210mi (340km) route inland to Yosemite starts along Interstate 580.

Getting Around San Francisco

Within the compact city center, walking is a pleasurable way to get around, but there's a solid transport network backing you up when perambulation seems too pedestrian. San Francisco's principal public transport system is the Municipal Transit Agency (MUNI), which operates nearly 100 bus lines (many of them electric trolley buses), streetcars and the famous cable cars. The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system is a convenient, economical subway system linking San Francisco with the East Bay. Ferries have enjoyed a modest revival in recent years, and there are services from Fisherman's Wharf and the Embarcadero Ferry Building to Alameda, Oakland, Sausalito, Tiburon and the bay islands.

A car is the last thing you want in downtown San Francisco: negotiating the hills and trying to find a parking spot are going to stress both you and your machine. For traveling farther afield though - up to the Wine Country for example - a car can be invaluable. Taxis are tough to secure in San Francisco; you may find phoning one easier than whistling or waving your hand on street corners, especially during peak hours, but even that's no guarantee.

For most visitors, the thought of hopping a bicycle in the city is gruesome - there's too much traffic and the hills are fearsome - but the Bay Area is a great place for recreational biking. Downtown becomes a sea of festive bicyclists on the last Friday of every month when Critical Mass, a cheerfully anarchic ride of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of cyclists, gathers at the bay end of Market St and rides, bells ringing, to a different destination along a different route each time.