Presidio of San Francisco
place in California listed on National Register of Historic Places
The Presidio of San Francisco (originally, El Presidio Real de San Francisco or The Royal Fortress of Saint Francis) is a park and former U.S. Army post on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula in San Francisco, California, and is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
It had been a fortified location since September 17, 1776, when New Spain established the presidio to gain a foothold in Alta California and the San Francisco Bay. It passed to Mexico in 1820, which in turn passed it to the United States in 1848. As part of a military reduction program under the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process from 1988, Congress voted to end the Presidio's status as an active military installation of the U.S. Army. On October 1, 1994, it was transferred to the National Park Service, ending 219 years of military use and beginning its next phase of mixed commercial and public use.
In 1996, the United States Congress created the Presidio Trust to oversee and manage the interior 80% of the park's lands, with the National Park Service managing the coastal 20%. In a first-of-its-kind structure, Congress mandated that the Presidio Trust make the Presidio financially self-sufficient by 2013. The Presidio achieved the goal in 2005, eight years ahead of the deadline.
The Presidio is at the southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge, and is crossed by the bridge approach road.
The park has many wooded areas, hills, and scenic vistas overlooking the Golden Gate itself, the Bridge, San Francisco Bay, and the Pacific Ocean.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Presidio of San Francisco” as place in California listed on National Register of Historic Places. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as place in California listed on National Register of Historic Places. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1755360. VIAF identifies the subject as 268787398. The Library of Congress control number is n2014062747. Authority coordinates are 37.798, -122.466. 7 of 10 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1776, 1820, 1848 and 1988.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Presidio of San Francisco” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.