San Francisco Travel Information
San Francisco (area pop. 2.7 million) is one of the few North American
cities to achieve the legendary status of such places as Paris or
London. It is a city defined by collisions: of Mexican, Asian, and
American cultures, of the cold north Pacific Ocean with the sunny
California mainland, of 18th century Spanish missions with 21st
century financial skyscrapers. Whether you’re in sight of landmarks
like Alcatraz or the Golden Gate Bridge makes no difference: San
Francisco’s tangible character is enough to tell you where you are.
This is a city steeped in the unique. The signature fog and
fast-moving cloud banks, the rolling urban hills and side-mounted
traffic lights, the enclaves of diverse communities encompassing
engineers, hippies, and everyone in between; the cable cars, the
brightly painted Victorian homes: there’s nowhere in the world quite
like San Francisco. Mentioning neighborhoods such as Chinatown,
Haight-Ashbury, the Castro, and the Mission District evokes images of
millions of voices that have shaped not only the city, but the
nation. San Francisco and the surrounding area have expanded
tremendously over the past century, creating an urban metropolis known
as the Bay Area. Centered around the 50-mile long San Francisco Bay,
the area is connected by an extensive public transportation network
and a series of impressive bridges. San Francisco itself is located on
a peninsula; the San Jose area is at the
south end of the bay and the Oakland area is
on the mainland side. San Francisco is located on the west coast of
central California, about 90 miles southwest of Sacramento.
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