San Francisco Bay Area Travel Guide
Region of California known for its natural beauty, prominent universities, technology companies, and affluence. The Bay Area contains the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, Silicon Valley, and associated regional, state, and national parks
Places to See in San Francisco Bay Area
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Invertzoo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Image Size Adjusted
Invertzoo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Image Size Adjusted
-400.jpg)
Invertzoo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Image Size Adjusted
Invertzoo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Image Size Adjusted
Namesake of both the city and county of Santa Clara, as well as of Santa Clara University. Although ruined and rebuilt six times, the settlement was never abandoned, and today it functions as the university chapel for Santa Clara University
Invertzoo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Image Size Adjusted
Visitor7, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Image Size Adjusted
Overview
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a region of California centered around the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is known for its natural beauty, prominent universities, technology companies, and affluence. The Bay Area contains many cities, towns, airports, and associated regional, state, and national parks.
The most populous cities of the Bay Area are Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose. The nine-county Bay Area is home to approximately 7.52 million people. It is the second-largest in California—after the Greater Los Angeles area—and the fifth-largest in the United States.
In 1535, the Spanish empire established kingdom of New Spain which inherited the empire's claims to much of what is now the western United States, including the Bay Area. The earliest Spanish exploration of the Bay Area took place in 1769, and the earliest European settlements in the area date this time period. The Mexican government controlled the area from 1821—following the Mexican War of Independence—until the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which ended the Mexican-American War.
In 1848, James W. Marshall discovered gold in nearby mountains, resulting in explosive immigration to the area. The California Gold Rush brought rapid growth to San Francisco specifically, transforming it from an unimportant hamlet into a busy port and the largest city on the West Coast at the time. California was admitted as the 31st state in 1850, and during the early years of statehood, state legislative business was briefly conducted in the Bay Area cities of San José, Vallejo, and Benicia, before being permanently relocated to Sacramento in 1854.
During World War II, the Bay Area played a major role in America's war effort in the Asiatic-Pacific Theater, with the San Francisco Port of Embarkation, of which Fort Mason was one of 14 installations and location of the headquarters, acting as a primary embarkation point for American forces. In 1945, the United Nations Charter was signed in San Francisco, establishing the United Nations before permanently relocating to Manhattan, and in 1951, the Treaty of San Francisco re-established peaceful relations between Japan and the Allied Powers. Since then, the Bay Area has experienced numerous political, cultural, and artistic movements, developing unique local genres in music and art.
The Bay Area is known for its stands of coast redwoods, many of which are protected in state and county parks. The region is additionally known for the complexity of its landforms, the result of millions of years of tectonic plate movements. The Bay Area is host to 6 professional sports teams and is a cultural center for music, theater, and the arts. It is also host to numerous higher education institutions, including research universities such as Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.
The Bay Area is located in the warm-summer Mediterranean climate zone that is a characteristic of California's coast, featuring mild to cool winters with occasional rainfall, and warm to hot, dry summers. It is largely influenced by the cold California Current, which penetrates the natural mountainous barrier along the coast by traveling through various gaps. In terms of precipitation, this means that the Bay Area has pronounced seasons. The winter season, which roughly runs between November and March, is the source of about 82% of annual precipitation in the area. In the South Bay and further inland, while the winter season is cool and mild, the summer season is characterized by warm sunny days, while in San Francisco and areas closer to the Golden Gate strait, the summer season is periodically affected by fog.
The Bay Area is home to six professional major league sports franchises: The San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League (NFL) in American football, the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics of Major League Baseball (MLB), the Golden State Warriors of the National Basketball Association (NBA), the San Jose Sharks of the National Hockey League (NHL), and the San Jose Earthquakes of Major League Soccer (MLS).
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "San Francisco Bay Area", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0