California

San Francisco has an atmosphere of genteel chic mixed with offbeat innovation and a self-effacing quality so blatantly missing from brassy New York and plastic LA. Its hilly streets provide some gorgeous glimpses of the sparkling bay and its famous bridges.

Before the 20th century

When the Civic Center BART station was under construction in 1970, workers discovered the thigh bone of a young woman, dating to about 3000 BC. This bone is the earliest evidence of human life to be uncovered in San Francisco, although the shell mounds left behind by people who subsisted on mussels and other seafood indicate the area was populated long before that. By 1000 BC the last native group to reside here, the Ohlone people, had constructed temporary villages in the marshlands near the bay shore and along inland creeks. They maintained this way of life until California fell under Spanish rule.

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 60km (35mi) 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 (named after 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 theatres to entertain the hard-spending miners. From the days of the Gold Rush, San Francisco was always 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.

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 centre.

Modern history

There had been major earthquakes in San Francisco in 1812 and 1865, but the Big One of 18 April 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. 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. 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, despite enormous public works projects. 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.

It was in 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. Neighbouring 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 in 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.

Recent history

In the 1990s the Bay Area experienced another period of urban renewal with a building boom that spruced up neighbourhoods 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 change just keep on rolling in. In 2004, Mayor Gavin Newsome defied state law by issuing licenses for same-sex marriages - a decision that was officially terminated a few months later by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Top Accommodation

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  The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco

  San Francisco

  Exquisite service, fine dining and elegant surroundings

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Top Restaurants

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  Slanted Door

  San Francisco

  San Francisco's most effortlessly elegant restaurant harmonizes Continental and American influences and Vietnamese inclinations ...

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  3 ratings

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  Greens

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  Career carnivores won't realize there's no meat in the hearty black bean chili ...

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  3 ratings

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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, icy winds don't help either.

Top Attractions

MH De Young Memorial Museum Golden Gate Park 2 ratings 1 review	Ferry Building Embarcadero 1 rating 1 review
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SoMa 1 rating 1 review	Golden Gate Bridge The Presidio 1 rating 1 review

San Francisco is a popular location any time of the year. Summer is the prime tourist season, but its summer weather is none too hospitable: 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.

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Transport

Getting around

Within the compact city centre, 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 Muni (San Francisco Municipal Railway), 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 are a scenic way to get around.

A car is more of a liability than an asset in downtown San Francisco: hills are steep and parking spots few. If you're considering a taxi, the best way is to phone.

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.

Getting there and away

The Bay Area has three major airports: San Francisco International Airport (SFO), Oakland International Airport (OAK) and San Jose International Airport (SJC). You can get to your hotel via shuttles, the BART system or taxi. There are different options at each airport.

By no means the only bus company in the area, Greyhound is the only one to operate a regular long-distance service in the region. Amtrak also ably services the Bay Area.

Health & Legal Requirements

Dangers and annoyances

Like most big US cities, San Francisco has its share of crime, but prudent travelers are not at any undue risk. Certain neighbourhoods are seedier than others and considered relatively unsafe, especially at night and for those walking alone; these include the Tenderloin, parts of the Mission, the Western Addition and 6th and 7th Sts south of Market. However, these areas are not always sharply defined, and travelers should be aware of their surroundings whenever they walk in the city. After dark, some of the city's parks, particularly Dolores Park and Buena Vista Park, become havens for drug dealing and unsavoury behaviour. The Bayview-Hunters Point neighbourhood north of 3-Com (Candlestick) Park, where the 49ers play, is plagued by a high crime rate and frequent violence and is not particularly suitable for wandering tourists.