San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, with a population of over seven million residents, is the metropolitan area that lies along the San Francisco Bay. This nine or ten county area (depending on whether you count Santa Cruz County or not - it doesn't adjoin the Bay, but culturally speaking, feels part of the liberal Bay Area), consists of cities of various size that lie more or less contiguously around the length of the bay. Three large cities dominate the area: San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland. Because, unlike most other metropolitan areas in the United States, no single large city dominates the region, residents generally refer to the region generically as the Bay Area, without associating it with any one city. However, because San Francisco was historically the first major city in the area, and because of its densely urbanized character in constrast to its neighbors, people in the region often refer to San Francisco as simply the City.
Map of the San Francisco Bay Area
Geography
The combined area of the nine Bay Area counties is 22,789 km2 (8,798 mi²), or 21,216 km2 (8,191 mi²), not including Santa Cruz County.
As well as constituting one of the world's greatest metropolitan areas, the Bay Area includes some exceptional natural coastal and rural landscape. It includes significant national parks such as the Point Reyes National Seashore, a large number of state parks including important ones like the Mount Diablo State Park, and numerous parks and preserves maintained by local government agencies - notably by the East Bay Regional Park District which has major land holdings in Alameda and Contra Costa counties. Most of these conserved areas are within easy reach of the metropolitan areas, many of them by public transportation.
Because the hills, mountains, and large bodies of water produce such vast geographic diversity within this region, the Bay Area offers a signficant variety of microclimates. The areas near the Pacific Ocean are generally characterized by relatively small temperature variations during the year, with cool foggy summers and mild rainy winters. Inland areas, especially those separated from the ocean by hills or mountains, have hotter summers and colder overnight temperatures during the winter.
Subregions
The population distribution of the Bay Area is generally subdivided into several smaller subregions. List of Counties
Anchor Cities
Suburbs with more than 100,000 inhabitants
Suburbs with 10,000 to 100,000 inhabitants
Suburbs with less than 10,000 inhabitants
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