San Francisco's Most Iconic Park Is A Giant Lush Oasis Of Museums, Trails, And Lakes

A visit to Golden Gate Park is a must when checking out San Francisco's famous landmarks. In a city known for its rows of Victorian townhouses packed tightly together across rolling hills, the park distinguishes itself as a wide-open oasis spread out over 1,000-plus acres. Named for the nearby strait connecting the Pacific to San Francisco Bay, Golden Gate Park is a place where you can feel the ocean breeze in your hair as you stroll winding trails around lakes and popular museums. The California Academy of Sciences is here, and both it and the park made our list of family-friendly San Francisco activities.

You could drive across the iconic Golden Gate Bridge and be at the park in minutes. Its underground Music Concourse Garage has 800 parking spaces, and thousands more are available all along the park's roadways. However, the JFK Promenade also provides a car-free trail from one side of Golden Gate Park to the other. You could rent a bike, cycle to the beach, and get your feet wet in the Pacific Ocean here. Speaking from personal experience, it doesn't get much more idyllic than that in San Francisco.

One way to see Golden Gate Park is on a sightseeing tour. Viator offers dozens of experiences, such as the San Francisco Love Tour, where you'll pass by the park on a shag-carpeted, hippie-style Volkswagen bus while listening to '60s music. However, there are also guided and self-guided tours that just focus on the park itself, allowing you to explore it to the fullest while enjoying fresh sunshine in the City by the Bay.

Golden Gate Park Bike Rentals is one way to get around the park on your own without feeling rushed. They provide you with a map, and you can do a two- or four-hour rental or DayPass, taking your time to stop and smell the orchids at the park's oldest building, the Victorian-style Conservatory of Flowers. One surprising sight you might see along the way is a meadow with a herd of bison, straight out of the Old West. The bison have had their own paddock in the park since 1892. It's one of the first stops on the small-group Golden Gate Park Bike Tour, which is operated by the same rental company, Unlimited Biking.

You'll leave from the historic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, where rock musicians like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin once lived. During the Summer of Love in 1967, "flower children" from across America descended on this neighborhood as part of the countercultural movement, though it's since been gentrified. After visiting the Bison Paddock, the tour gives you 30 minutes to snap pictures of the pagodas and springtime cherry blossoms in the Japanese Tea Garden, the first such garden in the U.S.

The tour includes 10-minute stops at the California Academy of Sciences and the Dutch Windmill on the park's western edge, near Ocean Beach. However, if you do a rental instead of the tour, you can lock your bike up and venture inside the California Academy of Sciences. Under its living green roof, you'll find everything from a four-story rainforest to a natural history museum with dinosaur skeletons (and an even bigger, 87-foot-long blue whale skeleton).

The Music Concourse — which holds free concerts several times a week from March to mid-November — runs from the California Academy of Sciences to de Young Museum. At the museum, you can see fine arts exhibitions and take in a 360-degree view of the park from the Hamon Observation Tower. Another interesting open-air museum piece (about a five-minute bike ride away) is the Portals of the Past monument. Located on the shore of Lloyd Lake, it's the freestanding remnant of a mansion where the entrance columns somehow survived the great earthquake of 1906.

Golden Gate Park has several other natural and artificial lakes, the largest of which is Blue Heron Lake (formerly known as Stow Lake). At the Blue Heron Boathouse, you can rent a rowboat or pedal boat to take out on the lake. In the middle of the lake, there's also an island you can explore as part of an easy hiking or biking loop — one of many in the park. The Golden Gate Park Loop is a 6.9-mile trail that will take you all around the park.

In the southeast corner of Golden Gate Park, the Koret Children's Quarter is said to be America's first public playground. It first opened in 1888 as the Sharon Quarters for Children and still holds a carousel that is over 100 years old. Kids can also climb a spider-web-like rope structure and ride pieces of cardboard down a twisting concrete slide. With so many activities to keep you and them busy, you'll definitely want to add this park (and the Golden Gate Bridge) to your California bucket list.