5 Great Places To View The Golden Gate Bridge

The Golden Gate Bridge is perhaps the most iconic symbol of San Francisco, CA. The suspension bridge connects San Francisco with Marin County and is part of Hwy 101 that stretches from northern Washington state down to southern California.

Due to its size and location, there are all kinds of great places to see the Golden Gate Bridge both from the south of it in San Francisco and the north of it in Marin County.

We spent six days in San Francisco in late February/early March 2022 and one day decided to drive around the area to view it from different spots. Everywhere we stopped provided a different perspective of the bridge, so here are five great places to view the Golden Gate Bridge.

1) Golden Gate Bridge View Vista Point

As the name suggests, Golden Gate Bridge View Vista Point gives you a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Having said that, it was probably my least favorite view of the five. Don’t get me wrong – it’s still a great view, but its location limits how much of the bridge you can see. As a result, I preferred the more expansive views we got at the next few sites.

Here’s a link to Golden Gate Bridge View Vista Point on Google Maps in case you want to get directions.

2) Golden Gate View Point

Our next stop was due to be Battery Spencer which is only a half-mile walk from Golden Gate Bridge View Vista Point. That pedestrian route takes you on a path beneath the end of the bridge to get to the other side of Hwy 101.

We hadn’t realized at the time that walking was an option, so we drove there which ended up being a longer 3.5 mile, 10-15 minute drive as it takes you on a loop up and around.

The potential benefit of driving is that the last half-mile or so of the driving route has a couple of overlooks where you can stop and get additional views of the bridge. We stopped at one of those – Golden Gate View Point – which you can find on Google Maps here.

As you can see, the views of the Golden Gate Bridge from Golden Gate View Point are incredible:

3) Battery Spencer

If you want, you can drive a little further down to the Battery Spencer parking area which you can find on Google Maps here. It wasn’t far from where we’d parked though, so we decided to just walk down to Battery Spencer from the Golden Gate View Point parking area.

Once you get to the Battery Spencer parking area, it’s only a quarter-mile walk to Battery Spencer itself. That gets you much closer to the bridge with an even more excellent view of it.

4) The Presidio

After viewing the Golden Gate Bridge from the north, we drove back along the bridge to view it from the south in The Presidio.

Rather than parking at Golden Gate Bridge Vista Point South, we drove further down to Long Ave where we got lucky and managed to park in one of only half a dozen parking spots along that stretch of the road (you can find it on Google Maps here) near Fort Point National Historic Site.

That parking area is right next to the water and gives you awesome views of the bridge from below.

From there we walked up the path leading you to the bridge itself with additional good photo spots along the way.

5) On The Bridge

Our first four suggestions of great places to see the Golden Gate Bridge give you good views from a distance. There’s a way to get a unique view of the bridge though and that’s by actually going on the bridge!

There are a couple of ways to do that. One is to drive across it; it’s free to drive the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco up to Marin County, but there’s a toll to drive it southbound back into San Francisco.

Taking a photo while driving along might not be particularly easy, so a better way can be to walk or bike across the bridge.

Something important to note if you travel with your pups is that dogs aren’t allowed on the Golden Gate Bridge. We’d brought Truffles with us that day as she wanted to check out all the different views too.

Shae had walked on the bridge the previous summer when visiting San Francisco with her friend, so she waited with Truffles at the beginning while I walked part of the way across the bridge.

That doesn’t mean that Shae missed out on going across the bridge during our visit though. In the morning before we left to head down to Monterey, she drove to the bridge and then biked across the bridge and back again.