Presidio of San Francisco

Long before this area became a public park, it served as a sprawling military base for three different nations. Spanish explorers established a walled fort here in seventeen seventy-six to defend the entrance to the bay, making this the northernmost outpost of their empire in North America. When you look at the landscape today, you are seeing the result of decades of military engineering that transformed what were once shifting, windswept sand dunes into a dense, managed urban forest.