The northern waterfront: Fort Mason to the Golden Gate

The flat shoreline from Fort Mason to the Golden Gate Bridge is the city’s best easy walk: an arts campus in a national park, a vegetarian restaurant with a bridge view, the Palace of Fine Arts, yacht clubs and Crissy Field’s long beach, with the bridge ahead of you the whole way.

Most of San Francisco is a climb. The northern waterfront is the exception: a flat, open shore that runs west from Fort Mason past the Marina and the Presidio to the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. It is the walk to take on a clear morning, with the Bay on one side and the bridge growing larger with every step.

Fort Mason

Begin at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, between Aquatic Park and the Marina Green, inside the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Nearly two dozen non-profit and arts organisations make their home in its buildings, and its galleries, theatres and piers host thousands of exhibitions, performances and events a year, with views of Alcatraz and the bridge. From April to December, a night market comes once a month.

Lunch with a view

Two of the campus’s residents are reasons to come on their own. Greens has celebrated vegetables since 1979, cooking from the harvests of local farmers and its own farm at Green Gulch, in a former warehouse whose floor-to-ceiling windows frame the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands. Next door, The Interval, the bar and café of the Long Now Foundation, pours cocktails, coffee and tea beneath a library that rises from floor to ceiling.

The Marina

Walk west along the Marina Green. On the water stand two members’ clubs, the St. Francis Yacht Club on Marina Boulevard and the Golden Gate Yacht Club at the end of the breakwater, both looking out to the Golden Gate. Turn inland for a few minutes to the Palace of Fine Arts, built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, whose rotunda and colonnades reflect in a lagoon at the western edge of the Marina.

From Fort Mason to Fort Point, the Golden Gate Bridge is ahead of you all the way.

Crissy Field

Back on the shore, Crissy Field is a long, flat stretch of beach and promenade running from the Marina to Fort Point, with the bridge in front of you the whole way. It is the easiest walk or bike ride to the Golden Gate, and on a clear day one of the most beautiful anywhere in the city.

To the bridge and beyond

The path ends at Fort Point National Historic Site, under the southern end of the bridge. From there, head on to Baker Beach, a mile of sand in the south-west corner of the Presidio with the bridge and the Marin Headlands across the water; it is a beach for picnics and views, not for swimming, as the currents are powerful and the water cold.

Our advice: walk east to west in the morning, before the wind picks up, book Greens for lunch on the way, bring a warm layer for Fort Point, and take a bus or taxi back rather than retracing your steps.