Straits of the Golden Gate - Definition and Overview

This article is about the strait in California. For other uses see Golden Gate (disambiguation)

The Golden Gate

The Golden Gate, looking south towards San Francisco. San Francisco Bay is on the left, and the Pacific Ocean is on the right

This image is from the GIMP photo archive (http://gimp-savvy.com/cgi-bin/img.cgi?ails0bcf1nuTSFM1111).

The Golden Gate is the strait connecting the San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. Since the 1930s it has been spanned by the Golden Gate Bridge.

Great tidal flows have scoured a channel several hundred feet deep through the straits.

Before the arrival of Europeans in the 18th century, the area around the strait and the bay was occupied by the Ohlone people. The discovery of the strait by early European explorers was surprisingly elusive. The strait is recorded in neither the voyages of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo nor Francis Drake, both of whom may have explored the nearby coast in the 16th century in search of the Northwest Passage. The strait is also unrecorded in observation by several Spanish galleons returning from the Philippines that laid up in nearby Drakes Bay.

The first recorded observation of the strait was nearly two hundred years later in 1769, by Sgt. Jose Ortega, the leader of a scouting party sent north along the peninsula of present-day San Francisco. Ortego reported that he could proceed no further because of the strait. Until the 1840s the strait was called the "Boca del Puerto de San Francisco" (Entrance to the Port of San Francisco). Sometime in the 1840s, however, the entrance acquired a new name. In his memoirs, John C. Frémont wrote, "To this Gate I gave the name of Chrysopylae, or GOLDEN GATE; for the same reasons that the harbor of Byzantium was called Chrysoceras, or GOLDEN HORN."

External links

• National Park Service: Discovery of the Golden Gate (http://www.nps.gov/prsf/history/hrs/elpresid/elpresid.pdf)
• Digitally Restored Panoramic Composited View of The Golden Gate, Fort Point, and San Francisco Bay as seen from "Land's End" near Sutro Heights, c. 1895. (http://CPRR.org/Museum/Golden_Gate_c1895.html)