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San Francisco
California's hilly bay city, capital of the tech economy
San Francisco crowds the tip of a hilly peninsula between the Pacific and its namesake bay, a compact city of steep streets, pastel row houses, and fog that pours through the Golden Gate. Only some 800,000 people live within its 121 square kilometers, but it anchors a wealthy Bay Area region of more than seven million and serves as the cultural and financial hub of Northern California. It is the gateway to Silicon Valley, a place whose name has become shorthand for the technology industry and the fortunes it has made.
The city sits at the end of a peninsula where the Pacific meets the strait known as the Golden Gate, the narrow opening into San Francisco Bay spanned since 1937 by its famous orange bridge. Its terrain is famously vertical: more than forty hills, some climbing past 280 meters, give the city its dramatic streets and views. Cool ocean water and the inland heat of the Central Valley conspire to draw the summer fog through the gate most afternoons. The peninsula straddles the San Andreas Fault, and the earthquake and fire of 1906 destroyed most of the city, which rebuilt rapidly on the same hills.
The Spanish established a mission and presidio here in 1776, but the settlement remained tiny until the discovery of gold in 1848 turned it overnight into a roaring boomtown and port of entry for the Gold Rush. It grew into the financial capital of the West, weathered the 1906 catastrophe, and became a center of countercultural movements in the twentieth century. The rise of the computer industry in the surrounding valley made it the wealthy epicenter of the digital age. Today San Francisco is a dense, expensive, and influential city, the urban face of the global tech economy.