Golden Gate Park, San Francisco — Visitor Guide & Things to Do Nearby

Golden Gate Park stretches 1,017 acres from the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood to the Pacific Ocean, making it one of the largest urban parks in the world and San Francisco's most important green space. The park was created in 1870 on land that an 1853 map labelled the "Great Sand Bank." Critics said nothing would grow in the windswept dunes. Engineer William Hammond Hall proved them wrong, planting over 155,000 trees using European land reclamation techniques and transforming barren sand into one of America's most beautiful parks. The park contains an extraordinary range of attractions. The Japanese Tea Garden, the oldest public Japanese garden in the United States, dates to 1894 and features pagodas, a tea house, and a drum bridge. The Conservatory of Flowers, a Victorian greenhouse from 1879, houses rare tropical plants. The California Academy of Sciences combines a natural history museum, aquarium, and planetarium under a living roof of native plants. The de Young Museum focuses on American, African, and Oceanic art. Golden Gate Park also holds an American first: the Koret Playground, originally called Sharon Quarters for Children, was the country's first public playground. With an estimated 24 million visitors a year, it is the third most visited urban park in the United States. If you're on a Questo quest through San Francisco, Golden Gate Park is a stop where an impossible dream turned sand dunes into a living masterpiece.