San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural, commercial, and financial centre of Northern California and the only consolidated city-county in California. San Francisco encompasses a land area of about 121 km² on the northern end of the San Francisco Peninsula, which makes it the smallest county in the state. It has a density of about 7,124 people per km², making it the most densely settled large city (population greater than 200,000) in the state of California and the second-most densely populated major city in the United States after New York City. San Francisco is the fourth-most populous city in California, after Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Jose, and the 13th-most populous city in the United States-with a Census-estimated 2015 population of 864,816. The city and its surrounding areas are known as the San Francisco Bay Area, and are a part of the larger OMB-designated San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland combined statistical area, the fifth most populous in the nation with an estimated population of 8.7 million.

San Francisco (Spanish for Saint Francis) was founded on 29 June 1776, when colonists from Spain established Presidio of San Francisco at the Golden Gate and Mission San Francisco de Asís named for St. Francis of Assisi a few miles away. The California Gold Rush of 1849 brought rapid growth, making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time. San Francisco became a consolidated city-county in 1856. After three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. In World War II, San Francisco was the port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater. After the war, the confluence of returning servicemen, massive immigration, liberalising attitudes, along with the rise of the "hippie" counterculture, the Sexual Revolution, the Peace Movement growing from opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War, and other factors led to the Summer of Love and the gay rights movement, cementing San Francisco as a centre of liberal activism in the United States. Politically, the city votes strongly along liberal Democratic Party lines.

A popular tourist destination, San Francisco is known for its cool summers, fog, steep rolling hills, eclectic mix of architecture, and landmarks, including the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, the former Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, Fisherman's Wharf, and its Chinatown district. San Francisco is also the headquarters of five major banking institutions and various other companies such as Levi Strauss & Co., Gap Inc., Salesforce.com, Dropbox, Reddit, Square, Inc., Dolby, Airbnb, Weebly, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Yelp, Pinterest, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, Mozilla, Wikimedia Foundation, and Craigslist. It has several nicknames, including "The City by the Bay", "Fog City", "San Fran", and "Frisco", as well as older ones like "The City that Knows How", "Baghdad by the Bay", "The Paris of the West", or simply "The City". As of 2015, San Francisco was ranked high on world livability rankings.

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Today our demostration of images taken by the Sentinel-1 (Radar7 SAR instrument) and Sentinel-2 (optical sensor), satellites of the Copernicus project family stops over the city of San Francisco. Famous for its beautiful setting, San Francisco is primarily located on the northern tip of a peninsula at the entrance to San Francisco Bay and is bordered by the Pacific Ocean in the west, Golden Gate Strait in the north, San Francisco Bay in the east, and San Bruno Mountain in the south. Alcatraz, Angel, Treasure, and Yerba Buena islands are part of the city. Built on the San Andreas Fault zone, San Francisco is prone to earthquakes.

In the bay we can see Treasure Island (visible under the Golden gate) and the Alcatraz Island above the surface of the bay. The Department of Justice used the island as a military prison from 1868 until 1933, when it became a federal prison for dangerous prisoners. The prison was closed in 1963. In 1969 a group of Sioux occupied the island in an effort to win recognition of their claim to the island. The Sioux were forced off the island in 1971. In 1972 Alcatraz became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which forms the largest urban national park in the world.

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