San Francisco Bay

A narrow passage through the coastal hills opens from the Pacific into the great sheltered waters of San Francisco Bay. Ohlone communities lived around its shores long before Spanish expeditions arrived; on the peninsula, the Ramaytush Ohlone inhabited a network of independent villages. The bay and its wetlands offered fish, shellfish, and other resources to the people who knew its shores.

In 1769, members of Gaspar de Portolá's expedition saw the bay from the hills of the peninsula. Six years later Juan Manuel de Ayala brought the #italic San Carlos#! through its entrance, and his pilot José de Cañizares surveyed the waters within. Spain established a presidio and Mission San Francisco de Asís in 1776, beginning a colonial transformation that brought displacement and devastating loss of life to the peninsula's Indigenous people.