San Francisco occupies the tip of a peninsula roughly seven miles by seven, which makes it one of the few large American cities that can be crossed on foot — and one of the few where doing so is genuinely hard work, because those seven miles are draped over more than forty hills. The compactness is the city's great gift to anyone with a few days. Chinatown, Union Square, North Beach and the waterfront sit within a short walk of one another, and the two great set pieces, the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz, are visible from the same stretch of shoreline.
The weather, which almost everybody gets wrong
This is the single most useful thing to know before booking, and it is counter-intuitive enough to catch out most first-time visitors. San Francisco's summer is cold.
Fog rolls in off the Pacific through June, July and August, often sitting over the city until early afternoon, and the wind that arrives with it makes the air feel colder than the figures suggest. July is the coolest month of the summer, with an average high of around 19°C. The warm, clear weather comes in September and October, when the fog retreats and average highs reach about 21°C — the two best months of the year, and not the ones most visitors book.
Winter is mild rather than cold, with average highs near 14°C, but it is when the rain falls. December through February account for most of the year's total, with eleven or twelve wet days in each. Late April and May are the next-best window after the autumn: less fog than summer, and only occasional rain.
In practical terms, layers in every month of the year, and a windproof jacket in July as much as in January. Arriving in August dressed for summer is the reason the souvenir shops on Fisherman's Wharf do such a steady trade in sweatshirts.
Getting about
The cable cars are a working part of the transport system rather than a museum piece, and they are the oldest of their kind still running anywhere. They are also slow — a little over nine miles an hour, which is about a brisk walking pace on the flat and feels considerably less than that going up Nob Hill. Worth doing once for what they are, and a poor way to cross the city in a hurry.
Everything else runs on Muni: buses, trolleybuses, the Metro light rail, and the historic F-line streetcars along the Embarcadero. BART links the airport to downtown and runs under the bay to Oakland and Berkeley. Fares on both systems are handled by the Clipper card, which also works from a phone, and contactless bank cards are accepted across much of the network — arrangements change, so the current position is worth checking rather than assumed.
A car is a liability. Parking is scarce, the central districts need no driving at all, and the hills are steep enough that the law requires wheels to be turned into the kerb when parking on them.
A few practicalities
Prices on shelves and menus exclude sales tax, which is added at the till, so the amount asked for is never quite the amount displayed. Tipping in restaurants is a matter of convention rather than discretion, and San Francisco restaurants increasingly add a service charge or a staff health surcharge to the bill — which means the bill is worth reading before anything further is added to it.
Mains voltage is 120 volts at 60 hertz on flat two-pin and three-pin sockets, so an adaptor is needed and anything without a dual-voltage power supply will not work on one.
Before travelling
British citizens visiting under the Visa Waiver Programme need an approved ESTA before boarding, for stays of up to ninety days. It is applied for online, covers multiple trips, and is generally valid for two years or until the passport expires, whichever comes first. The points that catch people out:
- The passport must be an e-passport, with a machine-readable zone and an electronic chip. Emergency passports do not qualify.
- Only passports showing British Citizenship qualify. British Subject, British Overseas Citizen and British National (Overseas) passports do not, and need a visa instead.
- The application should go in as soon as travel is being planned, ideally before tickets are booked, and at the very least seventy-two hours before departure.
- It should go through the official site, esta.cbp.dhs.gov. Third-party sites charge extra to forward the same application, and what they add cannot be recovered.
The requirement has applied to arrivals by land and sea as well as by air since October 2022, which matters to anyone crossing from Canada.
What the city holds
The waterfront is where most visits begin. Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39 are frankly touristic and busy with it, though the sea lions cost nothing and the views across to Alcatraz and the bridge are the reason the piers are there at all. Ghirardelli Square, a chocolate factory turned shopping and eating complex, sits at the western end. The ferries to Alcatraz leave from further east along the Embarcadero.
Alcatraz is the most heavily booked attraction in the city and the one that most repays the trouble of booking it. It was a military prison before it was a federal penitentiary, it held Al Capone and Robert Stroud, and it has stood empty since 1963.
Inland, the city divides into neighbourhoods with remarkably little in common. Chinatown is the oldest in North America and remains a working neighbourhood rather than a quarter arranged for visitors. Haight-Ashbury trades on 1967 — the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin both lived on or near it — and the tie-dye shops stand among some of the finest Victorian and Edwardian houses in the city, which is the better reason to walk it. North Beach is Italian and was the Beats' territory. The Mission has the murals, and much of the best eating.
Union Square anchors the downtown shopping district and is the point from which the cable car lines and most of the big hotels radiate. The square and the streets around it have changed a great deal in recent years, so expectations formed from older guidebooks are worth revising on arrival.
The museums are unusually good for a city of this size. The Legion of Honor holds the European collection in a Beaux-Arts building on the heights above the Golden Gate; the de Young, in Golden Gate Park, holds the American, African and Oceanic collections. The California Academy of Sciences, also in the park, rebuilt itself in 2008 and now contains an aquarium, a planetarium, a natural history museum and a four-storey rainforest beneath a living roof. The Exploratorium — hands-on science, and the model for interactive museums almost everywhere since — moved to Pier 15 on the Embarcadero in 2013, and is no longer at the Palace of Fine Arts where older accounts still place it.
Golden Gate Park is larger than Central Park and holds most of the above, along with a Japanese tea garden, a botanical garden and a bison paddock. The zoo is separate, out at the city's south-western corner where the land meets the ocean.
For performance, the opera and the ballet both have long seasons and permanent homes in the Civic Center, and the symphony sits across the street from them.
And then the Golden Gate Bridge, which opened in 1937. The colour is called international orange, and it began as the shade of the primer the steel arrived in — kept because it holds its own against fog, water and the brown hills behind it.
The pages in this section take the landmarks, the neighbourhoods and the museums in turn.