San Francisco Bay is a shallow, productive estuary through which water draining from approximately forty percent of California, flowing in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers from the Sierra Nevada mountains, enters the Pacific Ocean. Specifically, both rivers flow into Suisun Bay, which flows through the Carquinez Strait to meet with the Napa River at the entrance to San Pablo Bay, which connects at its south end to San Francisco Bay. However, the entire group of interconnected bays is often referred to as “San Francisco Bay”.
San Francisco Bay is located in the U.S. state of California, surrounded by a contiguous region known as the San Francisco Bay Area (often simply "the Bay Area"), dominated by the large cities San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose. The waterway entrance to San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean is called the Golden Gate. Across the strait spans the Golden Gate Bridge.
Read more about San Francisco Bay: Size, Geology, History, Ecology, Bay Fill and Depth Profile, Transportation, Recreation, Gallery
Famous quotes containing the words san francisco, san, francisco and/or bay:
“San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled—or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? Did we anticipate the ways in which, vivid and continuous, they would unsuit us for the business of daily life? Or should our notion of daily life itself be transformed?”
—Edmund White (b. 1940)
“The gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much a gambler as his fellow in the saloons of San Francisco. What difference does it make whether you shake dirt or shake dice? If you win, society is the loser.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Swan/Mary Rutledge: Oh no, no. I’m not running away. I came here to get something, and I’m going to get it.
Col. Cobb: Yes, but San Francisco is no place for a woman.
Swan: Why not? I’m not afraid. I like the fog. I like this new world. I like the noise of something happening.... I’m tired of dreaming, Colonel Cobb. I’m staying. I’m staying and holding out my hands for gold—bright, yellow gold.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)