The San Francisco Bay Area: a region with no firm edges and many reinventions

Ask where the Bay Area ends and the answer depends on who you ask. Wikivoyage's guide says it has no firm boundaries, covers at least parts of nine counties (Marin, Sonoma, Napa, Solano, San Francisco, San Mateo, Contra Costa, Alameda and Santa Clara), and may or may not include outlying towns such as Gilroy and Santa Cruz. Ringing San Francisco Bay in northern California, it is home to nearly 8 million people in cities such as San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose.

San Francisco's Chinatown with the Bay Bridge behind. Photo by Christian Mehlfuhrer (CC BY 3.0).

A region of nonconformists

Once a focus of Spanish missions and Gold Rush prospectors, the guide says the Bay Area is best known now for its alternative lifestyles, liberal politics and the high-tech industry of Silicon Valley. Its unifying feature, besides the hilly seaside landscape, is acceptance of unconventional lifestyles, an undercurrent the guide traces to the gold rush prospectors. The same current, it says, gave rise to the Summer of Love, the Black Panther Party, the "Gay Capital of America" and Silicon Valley, in a region that has been reinventing itself for well over a century.

The main cities

• San Francisco is the heart of the area, famous for its scenic beauty and unique culture.
• Oakland is a historic port city with a patchwork of cultural diversity, entertainment and urban parks.
• Berkeley is known for liberal activism, a world-class public university and cultural and culinary attractions.
• San Jose is the center of Silicon Valley and the largest city in the Bay Area.
• Palo Alto is a small, active city of tech startups, right by Stanford University.

The sub-regions are described in several ways, the guide says, which can leave first-time visitors thinking the Bay Area is bigger than it is. The boundary between the Peninsula and the South Bay is informal, and many locals put Palo Alto and Mountain View in the Peninsula.

Weather

The Bay Area is temperate in summer and mild in winter, an excellent place to visit year-round. It has microclimates: parts of the East Bay or North Bay can be as much as 25 °F (15 °C) warmer than downtown San Francisco or the Golden Gate Bridge. Crossing a hill or going through a tunnel can take you from hot sunshine to cool fog, and generally the closer you get to the ocean, the cooler it is. The guide advises dressing in layers.

What to see and do

The Golden Gate Bridge. Photo by Umer Sayyam (CC0).

The guide describes a multifaceted history. Miwok and Ohlone people, Spanish missionaries, Russian colonists, gold miners, the first Chinese community in North America, bohemians, beatniks, hippies and naval sailors all left marks. Among its distinctive sites are the island prison of Alcatraz, which once held Al Capone, the roots of modern environmentalism in Martinez, and the eccentric Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. Museums include the Exploratorium, the de Young Museum and California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa.

Alcatraz Island. Photo by Chris6d (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Outdoors, the guide names Point Reyes, a national seashore with hiking trails, hills and marine mammals, and Muir Woods, a forest of old-growth redwoods, both in Marin County, plus Mount Diablo, whose 20,000-acre state park has views on clear days that stretch 181 miles (291 km) to Mount Lassen, and Angel Island. A surprising number of trails are reachable by public transit, and the region has a strong biking culture, though much of it is hilly. Napa Valley in the North Bay is renowned for its wineries. Deer, coyotes, lizards, banana slugs, sea lions, herons, vultures and hawks are frequently seen, and the guide warns to check for ticks after hiking, because of a high rate of Lyme disease transmission.

Getting there and around

The three major airports are San Francisco International, the largest, Oakland, which serves U.S. and Mexican destinations, and San Jose in Silicon Valley. Amtrak's California Zephyr and Coast Starlight serve the area, with stations in places such as Martinez and Emeryville. By car, Interstate 80 arrives from the east, Highway 101 from the south, with Highway 5 more direct, and the guide calls 101 more scenic on the north coast approach and 5 efficient but somewhat boring.

Inside the region, a network of freeways serves the Bay Area, but major freeways, particularly in San Francisco and Oakland, suffer severe congestion at commute times, and some have dense traffic at any hour. The guide warns that tolls on the bridges are charged in one direction only. BART is an extensive regional metro connecting San Francisco to the East Bay, parts of the Peninsula, and the San Francisco and Oakland airports. Caltrain is a commuter line along the Peninsula between San Francisco, San Jose and Gilroy. Passenger ferries link many cities, especially in the North Bay, and the guide calls them a very scenic way to get around. It adds that housing in the Bay Area is notoriously expensive, and lodging is expensive for visitors as well.

Sources

• Wikivoyage, "Bay Area" (https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Bay_Area), by its contributors, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; changed here: rewritten and condensed in hubnx's own words, with listings, fares, phone numbers, maps and edit links left out. Photos, each under its own licence: Christian Mehlfuhrer (CC BY 3.0), Umer Sayyam (CC0), Chris6d (CC BY-SA 4.0).