San Francisco: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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In 1848 San Francisco had about a thousand people. Two years later it had twenty-five thousand, and the bay was full of ships whose crews had abandoned them for the gold fields. Those hulls were not salvaged — they were run aground, filled with sand and built on, and the Financial District stands on top of them; more than forty have been found during construction. This walk crosses the ground that was water, climbs the hill the Chinese community kept, and ends at the tower a woman paid for. Start at the Ferry Building at eight.

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A short history of San Francisco

In 1776 the Spanish established a mission and a fort here, and in 1847, when it was already in the hands of the United States, the settlement took its name from the mission. In 1848 gold was discovered in California, and within two years the village grew into a city of tens of thousands. Among the arrivals was Levi Strauss, a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria, who came in 1853 and opened a business from which blue jeans were born. On 18 April 1906 an earthquake and the fires that followed destroyed most of the city. In 1937 the Golden Gate Bridge opened. In the 1960s the city became the centre of the hippie movement, and later the nearby Silicon Valley developed into the capital of high technology.

The ten best sights in San Francisco

1
Mission Dolores
Founded 29 June 1776, five days before the Declaration of Independence, and it survived 1906 intact
2
Alcatraz Island
A federal prison from 1934 to 1963, and occupied by Native American activists for nineteen months from 1969
3
Angel Island Immigration Station
The Ellis Island of the west, 1910–1940; Chinese arrivals were detained here, sometimes for years
4
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The first museum on the west coast devoted to modern art, 1935; free for anyone eighteen and under
5
de Young Museum
In Golden Gate Park; the observation tower on the ninth floor is free even without a ticket
6
Legion of Honor
A full-size copy of a Paris palace on a clifftop, built in 1924 as a First World War memorial
7
Asian Art Museum
In the old main library of 1917; one of the largest Asian collections outside Asia
8
California Academy of Sciences
A living roof of two and a half acres planted with native species, over an aquarium and a rainforest
9
Exploratorium
Founded 1969 by a physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project; every exhibit can be handled
10
Cable Car Museum
Free, and it is the working powerhouse: the wheels that pull all three lines are turning in the room

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Tours in San Francisco →

A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in San Francisco:

Free walking tours in San Francisco

The city built on buried ships

Ferry Building · Before the bridges were built in 1936 and 1937 this was the second busiest transit terminal in the world after Charing Cross, with fifty thousand people a day crossing the bay by ferry. The bridges emptied it within a decade. The clock tower stopped at 5:12 in the 1906 earthquake and the building survived; it was then hidden behind a double-decker freeway from 1959 until the 1989 earthquake damaged that freeway and the city chose to demolish it instead of rebuilding.
Transamerica Pyramid · When it was proposed in 1969 it was the most hated building in the city and there were petitions against it; it is now on every postcard. The reason for the shape was practical — a pyramid casts less shadow on the streets around it than a box of the same floor area. The ground under it is landfill with ships in it, and the foundation is a concrete block nine metres deep.
Portsmouth Square · This was the plaza of the Mexican village of Yerba Buena, and it is where the American flag was raised in 1846 and where the discovery of gold was publicly announced in May 1848. Today it is Chinatown’s only real open space and it functions as the neighbourhood’s living room: elderly men play Chinese chess and mahjong here from early morning, because the flats around it are too small to sit in.
Stockton Street · One block uphill from the souvenir street, and it is the actual Chinatown: fish in tubs on the pavement, herbalists, and queues of people buying dinner. After the 1906 fire the city tried to move Chinatown out to Hunters Point and take this valuable land. The community refused, and rebuilt deliberately in an exaggerated pagoda style — commissioned from American architects — so that the district would be too profitable as an attraction to remove.
City Lights and Columbus Avenue · Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened this as the first all-paperback bookshop in America in 1953, and in 1956 his press published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. He was arrested and tried for obscenity; the judge ruled in 1957 that the poem had redeeming social importance, which set the precedent that later protected Lady Chatterley and Tropic of Cancer in the United States.
Coit Tower · Lillie Hitchcock Coit left a third of her estate to beautify the city and this was built with it in 1933. The persistent story that it is shaped like a fire hose nozzle, because she was a volunteer firefighter’s mascot as a girl, was denied by the architect. Inside, twenty-seven fresco murals were painted in 1934 by artists on a federal relief programme, and they are so openly left-wing that the opening was delayed by a dispute over them.

The Mission and the Castro

The Mission is the oldest part of San Francisco and the warmest: it sits in the lee of Twin Peaks, so the fog that covers the western half of the city stops at the ridge. The Spanish picked the spot in 1776 for exactly that reason. This route runs from the mission building through the murals that a Chicana artists’ collective began in 1972, into the district where Harvey Milk ran a camera shop and was elected in 1977. Go in the afternoon; this is the half of the city where afternoons work.

Mission Dolores · Founded on the twenty-ninth of June 1776, five days before the Declaration of Independence was signed on the other side of the continent. The small adobe chapel is the oldest intact building in San Francisco and it came through 1906 undamaged while the large basilica next door collapsed. Several thousand Ohlone people are buried in and around the cemetery, most of them unnamed, and a plaque now says so.
Balmy Alley · The murals here began in 1972 with a group of Chicana artists called Mujeres Muralistas, and in the 1980s the whole alley was repainted as a single statement against United States policy in Central America. It has been repainted continuously since, which means the alley is not a monument — the walls now carry work about evictions and the tech boom, and old pieces are painted over by agreement.
24th Street · This is the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District, designated by the city in 2014 — a legal designation that restricts chain stores and formula retail on the street, created specifically to slow the displacement of the Latino community during the tech boom. The panaderías, the murals and the lack of a single large chain on eight blocks are the result of a planning decision, not an accident.
Dolores Park · It was a Jewish cemetery until 1894, and after the 1906 earthquake it held one of the largest refugee camps in the city — sixteen hundred tents and about sixteen hundred families, for two years. There is a plaque and a surviving fire hydrant at Church and 20th painted gold: it was the only working hydrant in the area and the Mission was saved with it, which is why the Victorians south of here still stand.
Harvey Milk Plaza and 575 Castro · Milk ran a camera shop at 575 Castro and used it as a campaign office; he lost three elections before winning a seat on the Board of Supervisors in 1977, becoming the first openly gay elected official in California. He was shot dead in City Hall in November 1978 along with the mayor. The killer’s manslaughter verdict in 1979 set off the White Night riots, which started at this corner.
Castro Theatre · A 1922 cinema of fourteen hundred seats with a ceiling cast to look like a tent, and a Wurlitzer organ still played live before screenings — the organist traditionally ends with a song the whole audience sings. It is the last single-screen film palace of its era still operating in the city, and the neighbourhood fought a redevelopment plan over its seats in the 2020s.

Lands End to the Golden Gate

The western edge of San Francisco faces the open Pacific with nothing in between, and the whole strip from the ruined baths to the bridge is federal parkland, free, and almost empty on a weekday. The fog is the thing to understand: it is produced by cold upwelling water meeting warm inland air, it pours through the Golden Gate like a river, and it is thickest in July and August — the coldest summer weather of any American city. Bring a jacket in any month and check whether the bridge is visible before you commit.

Sutro Baths · Adolph Sutro, a Prussian-born mining engineer who became mayor, opened this in 1896: seven pools under a glass roof, one fresh and six salt, filled by the tide, with a capacity of about ten thousand people at once. It was the largest indoor swimming establishment in the world. It never made money, closed in 1952, and burned down in 1966 while being demolished for flats that were never built.
Lands End Trail · The trail follows the bed of a railway that ran out here until 1925, cut into cliffs that keep slumping into the sea. At low tide you can see the ribs of shipwrecks below — this stretch has wrecked dozens of ships, because the entrance to the bay is narrow, the current runs to six knots and the fog arrives without warning. The Mile Rock overlook has a stone labyrinth someone built without permission in 2004.
Baker Beach · The classic view of the bridge from sand, and the birthplace of something else: in June 1986 a man burned a wooden figure about two and a half metres tall on this beach in front of about twenty people, and repeated it annually until the police stopped it in 1990, at which point it moved to the Nevada desert and became Burning Man.
Fort Point · A brick coastal fort finished in 1861 with casemates for one hundred and twenty-six cannon, built to defend the gold against a Confederate raid that never came; it never fired a shot in anger. When the bridge was designed in the 1930s the fort was in the way, and rather than demolish it the engineers built a steel arch over it. Entry is free and the inside is cold in any weather.
The Golden Gate Bridge · Joseph Strauss got the credit, but the mathematics of the suspension design were done by Charles Ellis, who was taken off the project in 1931 and left uncredited; the bridge district formally recognised him only in 2007. Eleven men died building it and nineteen were saved by a safety net strung beneath — they called themselves the Halfway to Hell Club. The orange colour was chosen by the consulting architect over the navy’s proposal of black with yellow stripes.
Crissy Field · This was a military airfield from 1921 to 1974 — the first on the west coast — and the ground was a tidal marsh before that, filled in for the 1915 world’s fair. In 2001 about forty hectares of it were dug back out and the marsh was restored, and the shoreline birds returned within a season. The flat path from here to the bridge is the easiest two kilometres with the best view in the city.

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Getting to San Francisco and getting around

San Francisco International Airport · Twenty kilometres south and on the BART line; thirty minutes to downtown for about eleven dollars
Oakland International Airport · Across the bay; cheaper flights and a BART connector, but add forty minutes to everything
Salesforce Transit Center · The regional bus terminal, with a 5.4-acre park on its roof that is free and almost unknown
Caltrain, 4th and King · The commuter line down the peninsula to Palo Alto and San Jose; electrified in 2024
Powell Street Station · BART and Muni under Market Street, and the cable car turntable is at street level above it
Embarcadero Station · The last downtown stop before the bay; the Ferry Building and the ferries are at the exit
Pier 33 — Alcatraz ferry · The only legal way to Alcatraz and it sells out weeks ahead; one operator, no other boat lands

Cheap eats in San Francisco

Two things made San Francisco a food city and neither was a chef. The first was the Gold Rush, which dumped a hundred thousand people from everywhere on earth into one muddy port in three years, and the second is the agricultural valley an hour inland, which grows most of the fruit, vegetables and nuts in the United States. The result is a city where the counter food is genuinely local and genuinely immigrant at the same time, and where a bakery can be older than the state’s railways. Six to eighteen dollars a dish, cards everywhere, and tipping is expected even at a counter.

Sourdough · The bacterium in the city’s starters is named after San Francisco; a loaf is about eight dollars. Verified 10/2026
The Mission burrito · Rice inside, wrapped in foil, the size of a forearm; nine to twelve dollars and it is a whole meal
Dungeness crab · The local crab, in season roughly November to June; sold whole and cracked at the wharf stalls
Cioppino · A tomato fish stew invented by the Italian fishermen here, not in Italy; about twenty-five dollars
Swan Oyster Depot · A fish counter opened in 1912 with eighteen stools and no tables; cash was the rule for a century
Dim sum on Stockton Street · Takeaway windows selling by the piece; four dumplings for about three dollars and no English menu
Fortune cookies, Ross Alley · Folded by hand on a hot press in a one-room workshop; they are not Chinese and never were
Tartine Bakery · The loaf that changed how bread is baked in a dozen countries; the queue starts before opening
Tadich Grill · Opened by Croatian immigrants in 1849 and the oldest continuously running restaurant in California
Ferry Building farmers market · Saturday morning, and the stalls are growers rather than resellers; expensive and genuinely local
Alemany Farmers Market · Running since 1943 and the oldest in California; half the price of the Ferry Building and no visitors

Museums in San Francisco

San Francisco is a small city — about forty-seven square miles — with an unusually dense set of museums, and two of them are on islands. The useful thing to know is that several are free or nearly free on specific days, that the two in Golden Gate Park share a ticket arrangement, and that Alcatraz and Angel Island both require a ferry booked in advance. The Alcatraz ferry in particular sells out weeks ahead in summer and there is exactly one operator.

Alcatraz · The prison is the smaller half of the story; book weeks ahead and take the night tour if you can
Angel Island Immigration Station · Where Chinese arrivals were detained under the Exclusion Act; the carved poems were found in 1970
de Young Museum · The copper facade is perforated to mimic light through leaves and it is oxidising on purpose
California Academy of Sciences · A living roof of 1.7 million native plants over a planetarium, a rainforest dome and an aquarium
SFMOMA · Free for everyone eighteen and under; the living wall on the third-floor terrace is free to anyone
Legion of Honor · A full-scale copy of a Paris palace on a clifftop; built in 1924 by a sugar heiress as a war memorial
Asian Art Museum · In the 1917 main library, converted in 2003; one of the largest Asian collections outside Asia
Cable Car Museum · Free, and it is the actual winding house — the wheels pulling all three lines are turning in front of you
Exploratorium · Founded 1969 by Frank Oppenheimer, who was blacklisted from physics and became a teacher instead

Holy places in San Francisco

Religion in San Francisco has two threads that both start in the same place: the Spanish mission of 1776, which was built to convert the Ohlone and which killed most of them with disease and forced labour, and the waves of arrivals from everywhere afterwards, who built a Taoist temple above a shop, a Buddhist temple in Japantown, and a cathedral on the hill the railway barons lived on. The buildings here are mostly free and mostly small, and several are above street level — you go up stairs to find them.

Mission Dolores · 29 June 1776 — five days before the Declaration of Independence; the chapel is the oldest intact building here
Tin How Temple · Founded 1852 and the oldest Taoist temple in the United States; three flights up and no photographs
Grace Cathedral · The land was given by the Crocker railway family after their mansion burned in 1906; free to enter
Saints Peter and Paul · The Italian parish of North Beach; Joe DiMaggio was photographed on its steps but married elsewhere
Japantown and the Peace Pagoda · One of three Japantowns left in the country; the 1968 pagoda was a gift from Osaka
Japanese Tea Garden · The oldest public Japanese garden in the country, 1894; free before ten on three mornings a week
Contemporary Jewish Museum · Libeskind, 2008, grafted onto a 1907 power substation; the blue cube is the letter chet
Columbarium of San Francisco · Burial inside the city was banned in 1901 and the dead were moved out; this domed building is what remains

Nature and day trips near San Francisco

San Francisco occupies the tip of a peninsula with ocean on one side, a bay on the other and a strait at the end, and the consequence is weather that changes over a few hundred metres: it can be eighteen degrees and fogbound at Ocean Beach and twenty-eight and clear in the Mission at the same hour. The fog pours in through the Golden Gate because cold upwelling sea water meets hot inland air, and it peaks in July and August — the summer here is the coldest of any major American city. The parks are federal, free and open from dawn.

Golden Gate Park · Larger than Central Park, and the whole site was shifting sand dunes until the 1870s
Lands End · Cliff trail on an old railway bed; two shipwrecks visible at low tide and the bridge between cypresses
Presidio and the tunnel tops · A military post under Spanish, Mexican and American flags for 218 years; a meadow now covers a motorway
Crissy Field marsh · Forty hectares of airfield dug out in 2001 and returned to tidal marsh; the birds came back in a season
Twin Peaks · 280 metres, often above the fog, and the ridge is why the Mission gets sun and the Sunset does not
Mount Davidson · The highest point in the city at 282 metres, with a eucalyptus wood on top and almost nobody in it
Fort Funston · Cliffs at the city’s south-west corner; hang gliders launch from them and dogs run off lead
Muir Woods · Old-growth coast redwood nineteen kilometres north; you must book a parking or shuttle slot in advance
Marin Headlands · The hills on the far side of the bridge; wartime gun batteries, and the postcard view is from Spencer

Things to do in San Francisco with kids

San Francisco is unusually easy with children for an American city, because it is small, the public transport includes a cable car and a historic streetcar that children treat as rides, and several of the best things are free. Two warnings that matter more here than elsewhere: the hills are genuinely steep with a pushchair, so plan routes along the flat, and the summer fog at the beaches is cold — children need a jacket in August.

Exploratorium · Six hundred hands-on exhibits on a pier; the Tactile Dome is a separate booking and worth it
California Academy of Sciences · Aquarium, planetarium, rainforest dome and a living roof in one ticket; busiest at eleven
The sea lions at Pier 39 · Free; they arrived by themselves in 1989 after the earthquake and took over the boat docks
The cable cars · A ride is a flat fare; hang on at the open end and the queue at Powell is shorter from the other end
Hyde Street Pier ships · Six historic vessels you can board and go below deck on, including an 1886 square-rigged ship
Golden Gate Park playgrounds and carousel · The Koret playground is the oldest public children’s playground in the United States, from 1888
Seward Street Slides · Two concrete slides built into a hillside in 1973 after a local child won a design competition; free
Crissy Field · A flat grass field, a beach and the bridge in front; kite flying here is close to compulsory

Nightlife in San Francisco

San Francisco goes out early and closes hard: last call is two o’clock by state law with no exceptions, and in practice many bars empty well before that. The districts are distinct and you pick one for the evening — the Mission for bars and taquerías, the Castro for the oldest continuously gay nightlife district in the world, North Beach for the Italian cafés and the jazz, Hayes Valley for drinks before the opera. Two useful facts: the city is small enough to walk between several of them, and a seventeen-degree evening in July surprises everybody.

Valencia Street, Mission · The densest bar strip in the city and the warmest district; walkable end to end in twenty minutes
The Castro · The oldest continuously gay nightlife district in the world; the rainbow flag was designed here in 1978
North Beach · Italian cafés that have been there seventy years, and the bar next to City Lights where the Beats drank
The Fillmore · The 1912 hall Bill Graham ran from 1965; they still hand you a free apple on the way in
Hayes Valley · Wine bars and beer gardens a block from the opera and the symphony; it empties by eleven
Oracle Park · A baseball stadium on the bay where home runs land in the water; people wait in kayaks for them

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Frequently asked questions about San Francisco

What is there to see in San Francisco?

The top sights in San Francisco are Mission Dolores, Alcatraz Island and Angel Island Immigration Station. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in San Francisco?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of San Francisco without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in San Francisco?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in San Francisco, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The city built on buried ships.

How do you get to San Francisco and get around?

The main ways are San Francisco International Airport, Oakland International Airport and Salesforce Transit Center. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in San Francisco, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in San Francisco that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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