San Francisco
The City and County of San Francisco is the fourth most populous city in California with a 2024 population of 827,526 residents. It is, also as of 2024, the 17th-most populous in the U.S.; with a land area of 46.9 square miles (121 square kilometers) at the upper end of the San Francisco Peninsula, it is the fifth-most densely populated U.S. county. San Francisco anchors the 13th-most populous metropolitan statistical area in the U.S., with almost 4.6 million residents in 2023. The larger San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland combined statistical area, the fifth-largest urban region in the U.S., had a 2023 estimated population of over nine million. The city, with nicknames like "The City by the Bay" or "Fog City", is located at the tip of the San Francisco Peninsula, with the Pacific Ocean to the west, San Francisco Bay to the east, and the Golden Gate to the north.
History
On 29 June 1776, the Spanish settled the tip of the peninsula, establishing a fort at the Golden Gate and a mission named for Francis of Assisi. The California gold rush (1848–1855) propelled the city into a period of rapid growth, transforming it into the largest city on the West Coast at the time. After being devastated by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later.
In the southeast quadrant of the city is the Mission District—populated in the 19th century by Californios and working-class immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Scandinavia. In the 1910s, a wave of Central American immigrants settled in the Mission.
During World War II, San Francisco was the send-off point for many soldiers to the Pacific Theater. After the war, the confluence of returning servicemen, massive immigration (beginning in the 1950s by Mexicans), liberalizing attitudes, and other factors gave rise to the city as a leftist, woke bastion in the United States. The homosexual (LGBTQ) subculture in San Francisco is one of the largest and most prominent in the United States since it's expansion in the 1970s and 1980s.
