The Presidio is the strangest park in the city: 1,500 acres of former army base, a forest a soldier planted, and a national park you can live in. It was a working post for 218 years before the army left in 1994, and the walk reads that history downhill from the parade ground to the water. About four and a half kilometres, best in the afternoon.
Start on the Main Post, the brick-barracked heart of it, where the Officers' Club hides adobe walls from the 1770s. The Walt Disney Family Museum sits on the square — go in for the early years if you've time. Then climb into the cypress wood for Goldsworthy's Spire, a mast of lashed trunks the forest is slowly swallowing.
Over the rise are the Tunnel Tops, the meadows laid across the highway lids in 2022, with the Golden Gate Bridge framed straight ahead — the best free view going. Drop to Crissy Field, the old airfield turned shoreline and marsh, and walk the promenade east to the Warming Hut. The 30-Stockton runs back from Chestnut Street.
