The Best Things to Do Outside in San Francisco, by the Record
The best things to do outside in San Francisco, by the professional record: Condé Nast Traveler has weighed in, and their honors are what rank this list. Baker Beach comes out on top.
Chinatown and Golden Gate Park hold the next two places.
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A long strip of sand tucked beneath the Presidio's bluffs, with the Golden Gate close enough to feel like a backdrop someone forgot to take down. The surf looks inviting and is genuinely dangerous, so most people stay on dry land and enjoy the view, which is the point anyway. Fog rolls in more often than sun, so dress for it. The Sand Ladder at the north end connects to trails along the bluffs for anyone who wants to turn a beach walk into a hike.
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The oldest Chinatown in North America sprawls across 30 dense blocks, and it rewards wandering on foot more than any map can promise. Tin How Temple sits quietly on a third-floor walkup, incense thick in the air while neighbors light candles and pray. A few streets over, the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory folds cookies by hand amid whirring machinery. The lanterns and neon signs are as good as advertised, which almost never happens.
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A drum circle can materialize next to a serene Japanese garden on the same afternoon you pedal a boat past ducks on Blue Heron Lake, which is more or less how Golden Gate Park operates. The California Academy of Sciences anchors the cultural end, with a living rainforest and an albino alligator named Claude. The 1914 carousel still spins its painted lions and dragons to carnival music, and the park band has been playing free summer concerts here since forever.
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The corner of Haight and Ashbury still draws people who want to feel the ghost of 1967, but the neighborhood has long since grown into its own thing. Painted Victorians sit alongside vintage shops, record stores, and cafés where nobody is in a hurry. The proximity to Golden Gate Park means an afternoon here tends to drift pleasantly sideways. Come for the browse, stay for the walk.
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The coastal redwoods here top 250 feet, and standing under them has a way of making whatever you were anxious about feel appropriately small. This 558-acre national monument northwest of San Francisco holds one of the last ancient redwood groves in the Bay Area, with about six miles of trails winding past Cathedral Grove and along Redwood Creek. Serious hikers can push into adjacent Mount Tamalpais State Park when the trees aren't enough.
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Columbus Avenue moves at the pace of a neighborhood that has been arguing, pleasantly, about whether to have another espresso since the Beat poets were still alive. North Beach is San Francisco's Italian quarter by heritage, literary enclave by reputation, and genuinely pleasant afternoon by default. Sidewalk cafés, old-school red-sauce spots, and City Lights bookstore orbit Washington Square Park, with Chinatown a short walk when you need a change of scene.
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A former Army post turned National Park, the Presidio is the kind of place where eucalyptus groves give way to cliffside overlooks, historic bunkers, and a walk along Crissy Field that ends directly beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. Andy Goldsworthy's natural installations are scattered throughout, the Tunnel Tops park has lawns and food trucks for easy afternoons, and the Tennessee Hollow Trail winds through a restored wetlands thick with birds.
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A former highway reclaimed from cars and handed back to the wind, Sunset Dunes is a two-mile coastal promenade running along San Francisco's western edge with the Pacific sitting right there the whole time. Public murals mark the route, Outer Sunset cafes are steps away, and the mood is somewhere between a long exhale and a Sunday with nowhere to be. Bring a stroller, a bike, or just good shoes.