San Francisco’s year: festivals, stadiums and stages

About San Francisco’s year: festivals, stadiums and stages

By the ULTIMATE San Francisco Editorial Team

San Francisco’s year is full of parades, festivals and music in the parks, and the city has some of America’s great stages, ballparks and universities. Here is the calendar, the venues and the writers and architects who shaped the city.

Winter and spring

Chinese New Year brings a festival and a great evening parade through Union Square and Chinatown, lit by lanterns and led by a long golden dragon. In April the San Francisco International Film Festival, held since 1957, shows new films from around the world, and in May thousands of runners, many in costume, cross the city from the Bay to Ocean Beach in Bay to Breakers, a race held since 1912.

Summer

San Francisco Pride, on the last weekend of June, is one of the biggest Pride celebrations in the world, with a parade down Market Street and a festival at the Civic Center. On summer Sundays the Stern Grove Festival, held since 1938, puts on concerts in a eucalyptus grove, and in August the Outside Lands music festival fills Golden Gate Park.

Every October the Blue Angels fly over the Bay for Fleet Week.

Autumn

October is the city’s great month. Fleet Week brings navy ships to the Bay and the Blue Angels’ air show over the water off the Marina; Hardly Strictly Bluegrass fills Golden Gate Park with music; and Litquake, the city’s literary festival, takes over bookshops and bars. Autumn days are often the warmest and clearest of the year.

Opera, ballet and symphony

The San Francisco Opera performs at the War Memorial Opera House, opened in 1932. The San Francisco Ballet, the oldest professional ballet company in the United States, shares the house; it staged the first full-length American Nutcracker in 1944 and still dances it every December. The San Francisco Symphony plays at Davies Symphony Hall across the street.

Stadiums and arenas

The San Francisco Giants play baseball at Oracle Park, opened in 2000 on the waterfront, where home runs can land in the Bay. The Golden State Warriors and the Valkyries play basketball at the Chase Center in Mission Bay, opened in 2019. The San Francisco 49ers play at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, which hosted Super Bowl LX in February 2026.

Universities

The Bay Area is one of the world’s great centres of learning. UC Berkeley, founded in 1868, is across the Bay; Stanford, which opened in 1891, is an hour south; and in the city itself, UCSF is a leading medical university and the University of San Francisco was founded in 1855. On Pier 15 the Exploratorium, a hands-on museum of science, art and perception, is a favourite with families.

Writers and poets

Mark Twain was a young reporter here in the 1860s, Robert Louis Stevenson lived here in 1879–80, and Jack London was born in the city in 1876. Dashiell Hammett set The Maltese Falcon in its streets; a plaque on Burritt Street marks where Sam Spade’s partner was killed. The Beat poets made North Beach their home, Lawrence Ferlinghetti became the city’s first poet laureate in 1998, Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City began as a newspaper serial in 1976, and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is set among the families of Chinatown.

Architects

After 1906 the city was rebuilt by architects such as Julia Morgan, the first woman admitted to study architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, who restored the Fairmont hotel; Bernard Maybeck; Arthur Brown Jr., whose domed City Hall opened in 1915; and Willis Polk, whose Hallidie Building of 1918 has one of the first glass curtain walls. Later came William Pereira’s Transamerica Pyramid (1972), Herzog & de Meuron’s de Young museum (2005), Renzo Piano’s California Academy of Sciences (2008) with its living roof, Snøhetta’s SFMOMA expansion (2016) and Pelli Clarke Pelli’s Salesforce Tower (2018).

On screen

San Francisco is one of cinema’s favourite cities: Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and the car chase of Bullitt (1968) are the classics. The Castro Theatre, a movie palace of 1922, is the place to see a film here.

Our advice: come in September or October, when the fog lifts, the days are warm, and Fleet Week and the festivals fill the calendar. Book hotels early for Fleet Week and Pride.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with San Francisco’s year: festivals, stadiums and stages before you go.