Indian Chief Travel Guides

San Francisco: The City by the Bay

San Francisco is unequivocally the most popular, most visited city in the United States. It is the City by the Bay, the city built on rock and roll, the home of bohemians and the Beat Generation, and that of the "flower children" of the Summer of Love and the 60's and 70's counterculture. And this is not just the liberal bastion of America, but that of the world. This is where mayoral contests are more likely to be between Democrats and Greens, rather than Democrats and Republicans.

I Left My Heart in San Francisco

But San Francisco is much more than just a progressive city. It is at once chic, cosmopolitan, multi ethnic, rich in culture, hugely creative, brimming with optimism, and perhaps one of the most resilient cities in the world, which has risen from the ashes of fires and the rubble of earthquakes on more than one occassion, the last in 1989. It is a city of culinary innovation, haute couture, and the arts. It is the home of the world-renowned San Francisco Opera, the San Francisco Ballet, the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and myriad art galleries and museums. It is a city filled with gourmet restaurants and funky cafés, and bookstores where Ginsberg's and Rimbaud's verses hold sway. It is a place where Nieman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and Tiffany's vie for space on the same block. It is a city of neighborhoods that are as disparate as the ethnicities they embower, yet remarkably cohesive on a grander scale. It is a city of hills that rise and fall like a roller coaster to amaze and delight and offer commanding views of the bay from their crests. It is a city of cable cars, Victorians, murals, bridges, flower vendors, sophisticates and panhandlers, where even its criminal past (to wit, Alcatraz) is proudly on display. And of course, the city's essence is captured in many a song, not least among them, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco."

The city of San Francisco (and we are not talking about the greater San Francisco Bay Area) has a population of approximately 750,000, clustered in an area of just over 46 square miles. While winter temperatures here are moderate, and autumns offer generally crisp, clear blue skies, San Francisco summers are notoriously chilly, with some of the coolest temperatures of any city in the continental US, interspersed, of course, with those trademark rolling banks of fog.