But if you’ve never flown there before,

you might find yourself trying to remember where your life-jacket is.

With a population of around 850,000,

San Francisco is a bit bigger than Frankfurt and a bit smaller than Cologne.

Along with New York, it’s one of America’s most iconic cities,

and its economy is based on tourism, banking and technology.

“San Francisco” is Spanish for “St Francis”, and hints as the city’s origins.

18th-century Spanish settlers sought to convert the natives to Christianity,

and in 1776 founded La Misión de Nuestro Padre San Francisco de Asís,

popularly known as “Mission Delores”.

The original building was replaced by this one in 1791,

and it’s San Francisco’s oldest surviving building.

The church next door is much more modern:

it was built after a previous 19th-century church was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.

It’s now a minor basilica,

the first church west of the Mississippi to be designated a basilica.

But it was the Gold Rush of 1849 that really made San Francisco.

Within one year, the population rose from 1,000 to 25,000.

And with so many people arriving to find their fortunes, banks were founded,

beginning with Wells Fargo in 1852.

To this day, the finance sector is one of the city’s most important industries.

San Francisco is located on a peninsula at the entrance to the San Francisco Bay,

and so quickly became a busy port.

The Embarcadero stretches along much of the eastern and northern coastline,

a series of piers where boats could dock.

The Ferry Terminal was built in 1892

at the end of Market Street, San Francisco’s main thoroughfare.

Although the terminal building is now used for shops and offices,

ferries still operate from here.

Most of the piers, of course, are now used as offices, warehouses or parking lots.

Pier 27, however, has been transformed into a terminal for cruise ships.

More famous is Pier 39,

converted in the 1930s into a shopping centre

with an unusual attraction: a double-decker carousel.

The kitsch factor might be a little high for some people’s tastes,

but Pier 39 is popular with the tourists,

and is also popular with visitors of a different kind.

After the 1989 earthquake, sealions discovered one of the pier’s docks

as a great place to bask.

Although they normally avoid humans, they seemed quite happy here,

and have become a tourist attraction in their own right.

There weren’t many this year, as the water is too warm for the fish they usually eat,

but some years there can be several hundred of them.

Behind the Embarcadero is Telegraph Hill.

The tower on its summit, Coit Tower, was built in 1933,

but before then there was a semaphore signalling tower.

When a ship entered the Golden Gate, the signals could be set

to show whether it was friendly, hostile or in distress.

The city’s famous Chinatown also had its roots in the second half of the 19th century,

beginning with railroad workers, who tended to be Asians, settling down here —

mostly because, at the time, it was the only place where they were allowed to settle.

Today, it is one of the largest Chinese communities outside of Asia,

and another of San Francisco’s major tourist attractions.

Much more recently, a Japantown grew up a little way out of the downtown area.

In the 1960s, whole blocks were demolished

to make way for a new expressway and the new Japan Center.

Perhaps I just visited on the wrong day, but I personally feel

that the Japanese community deserves better than this unlovely concrete plaza;

It’s also a little confusing to be a place called “Japantown”,

and to see everywhere signs in Korean.

But just a few blocks away, old San Francisco is still intact.

This houses are not Victorian style, but Victorian-era:

the style is quintessentially American,

with elements borrowed from a variety of different times and places.

It was about this time that San Francisco looked with envy at New York’s Central Park,

and decided to create its own version.

The result was the Golden Gate Park, one of the world’s biggest urban parks.

Plants were carefully selected,

so that at any given time of year there was always something in bloom.

The Shakespeare Garden contains all the plants mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays,

but when I was there it was booked for a wedding.

The Golden Gate Park also has its own surprising carousel:

this one is indoors.

And I also discovered that

perhaps the most British of all sports, bowls, is played here.

The growing city needed a way of transporting large numbers of people

to wherever they needed to go; but there was a snag.

San Francisco is very hilly, but the streets are laid out in a grid.

This means that many of them are simply too steep for horse-drawn vehicles.

And so the cable car was invented.

It grips a permanently-moving cable, which then drags it along.

Only a few lines are left, but these are preserved as a tourist attraction.

In the 1980s, the system was shut down for a couple of years for renovations.

For the sake of the tourists, historic streetcars

from cities across America and even around the world

were operated along Market Street and the Embarcadero.

This proved so popular, that not only are these trams still running,

they, like the cable cars, are part of San Francisco’s official public transportation.

Modern trams also run in parts of the city.

But when they reach Market Street, they go underground,

forming a metro system very much like a German stadtbahn.

This is supplemented by the Bay Area Rapid Transit system,

which also runs underground through San Francisco, exactly like an S-Bahn.

In fact, local public transport is pretty decent.

But where Germans would be disappointed is long-distance travel.

While Frankfurt has two major stations and a third at the airport,

from where high-speed trains whisk you away to all parts of the country,

San Francisco has the Caltrain terminal, for local services to San Jose.

The nearest Amtrak station is on the other side of the bay, in Oakland.

There is still a lot of road traffic in San Francisco,

and, in an attempt to alleviate the worst of the problems,

a new metro line is being built to serve Chinatown.

As San Francisco grew during the second half of the 19th century,

thoughts turned to its defence.

The city’s motto, “Oro en paz, fierro en guerra” translates as: “Gold in peace, iron in war.”

Fort Point was to protect the entrance to the bay

against a possible invasion during the American Civil War.

Cannons placed at Fort Point, Lime Point and Alcatraz would catch ships in the crossfire.

In the event, no such invasion happened, and no guns were ever fired in anger.

In 1903, a victory column was built in Union Square,

commemorating the Battle of Manila Bay.

The model for the statue was a certain Alma de Bretteville,

who later married Adolph Spreckles.

As manager of the Spreckles Sugar Company,

Adolph was both much older and much richer than Alma,

and so became the original sugar daddy.

But one thing San Francisco is famous for is earthquakes.

It sits on the San Andreas fault, and from time to time the earth moves.

Most famously, the quake of 1906 destroyed large areas of the city

and started devastating fires.

Small wonder that the city is not shy about honouring its firefighters.

But rebuilding was swift.

A brand new city emerged, entire neighbourhoods rebuilt.

An imposing new City Hall was built as part of the Civic Center.

Grand structures like the Church of Saints Peter and Paul were built:

this is the church where Marilyn Munroe and Joe DiMaggio had their wedding photos taken,

and is also in San Francisco’s Italian district.

An area of downtown San Francisco stretching from the Civic Center to Union Square was transformed.

Nearly all the buildings in this area had been destroyed,

and new places were built in striking Art Deco style.

Hotels sprang up everywhere,

as well as theatres and other places of entertainment.

But more low-brow entertainment started coming in,

attracting less desireable people,

and the area became notoriously seedy.

Crime rates went up,

and as people left the area to live in more attractive neighbourhoods,

property prices fell and poorer people moved in.

Soon, apartments designed for singles and couples were home to entire families;

by the 1930s, the area had already acquired a name

borrowed from a similar neighbourhood in Manhattan: the Tenderloin.

Wikipedia rather diplomatically states that the Tenderloin “resisted gentrification”,

which is probably perfectly true.

But beginning in the 1970s, a new problem arrived:

cuts were made to the provision of psychiatric care.

The result is possibly the worst rate of homelessness of any major US city.

But even while the Tenderloin was falling into disrepute,

vast engineering projects were forging ahead and breaking new ground.

The best known of these is the Golden Gate Bridge,

built right over Fort Point and spanning the Golden Gate itself,

linking San Francisco with Sausalito.

And this is also the best place to appreciate the reasoning

behind San Francisco’s nickname of “Fog City”:

the fog rolls in from the Pacific, bathing downtown San Francisco in cold air,

keeping temperatures well down and ensuring that San Francisco’s number one bestselling souvenir

is the sweatshirt.

After four years of construction work, the bridge was finally opened in the spring of 1937,

and at that time had the world’s longest suspension bridge main span, nearly 1.3 km.

It wasn’t the longest bridge, though:

in total, it’s about 2.7 km long.

The Bay Bridge is over 7 km long in two sections:

it connects San Francisco with Oakland,

and was completed six months before the Golden Gate Bridge.

However, its longest span is less than 1 km.

San Francisco is a city of contrasts.

It’s one of America’s most historic, and one of its most forward-looking.

There is great wealth and extreme poverty,

and a jigsaw-puzzle of cultures somehow managing to live together

while simultaneously remaining separate.

Crammed into the tip of a peninsula in a notorious earthquake zone

miles from where any sensible trade route would go,

it probably shouldn’t even exist.

And yet, implausibly, it does.