San Francisco Bay

The bay is fed by two great river systems. The Sacramento drains the northern Sierra and the San Joaquin the southern, and together they carry roughly forty percent of California's fresh water down through the Delta and into the bay, where it mixes with the ocean tides sweeping in through the Golden Gate. That brackish blend, refreshed twice a day, is what makes an estuary so productive.

It is a big and varied body of water, with distinct arms like San Pablo Bay to the north and the broad South Bay, each with its own marshes and mudflats. The bay drains an area covering much of the state, which is why what happens in the far Sierra matters here at the coast.

The shores of San Francisco Bay are the ancestral home of the Ohlone peoples, who have lived here for thousands of years, drawing on the bay's marine, estuary, and freshwater habitats since at least the late Holocene. Several distinct Ohlone groups held homelands around the bay, from the Carquinez Strait south to Monterey.

Their long presence is written into the land itself. The bayshore was once dotted with over 400 shellmounds, great mounds of shell and earth that served as village sites, ceremonial grounds, and sacred burial places. Many were destroyed as the region was developed, but their memory and their descendants endure, and efforts to protect the surviving sites continue.

The bay is a linchpin of the Pacific Flyway. Its marshes and salt ponds host huge numbers of ducks, shorebirds, herons, and egrets, and over 500 bird species have been documented around it. Harbor seals haul out on its rocks, and the estuary is a nursery for salmon, steelhead, sturgeon, and Dungeness crab.

It is also one of the busiest working waterways in the country, crossed by ferries and container ships and spanned by the Golden Gate and Bay bridges. Much of its original tidal marsh was diked and filled over the last century, but large restoration projects are steadily returning salt ponds and baylands to tidal wetland.

There is no single way to see the bay, which is part of its charm. You can walk the Embarcadero in the city, ride a ferry to Sausalito or Angel Island, birdwatch in the South Bay marshes and wildlife refuges, or bike stretches of the Bay Trail that will one day ring the whole shoreline.

Expect wind and fog to funnel through the Golden Gate on summer afternoons, cooling the coast while the inland shores stay warmer. Morning is often the calmest and clearest time, and the light on the water at either end of the day is the reward.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.