SeeThe Avenues

Cliff House

The Cliff House, a well known landmark at the extreme western end of San Francisco, provides fantastic views of the coastline and the jagged Seal Rocks just off-shore and also contains the Camera Obscura, a fascinating room-sized device which projects an image of the surrounding scenery inside.

Address: 1090 Point Lobos Ave

Directions Suggest a nearby place

Listing from Wikivoyage: San Francisco/The Avenues, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Updated 27 Sept 2026. Something wrong? Tell us.

Close by

SeeThe Avenues
Sutro Baths
Wedged in a small beach inlet between the Cliff House and Point Lobos, these stone ruins were once a massive 19th-century public bath house that held multiple swimming pools, which fell into disrepair before being destroyed by fire in 1966, leaving only the concrete foundations and a pool flooded with seawater. The crumbling ruins make for some fun exploration, with a long tunnel into the cliff that leads to a view of a cove. Mind your step: the trails that descend to the site are steep and the ruins themselves pose hazards if you're careless.
Free
SeeThe Avenues
Lands End Lookout
Overlooking the Cliff House and the Sutro Baths is this new visitor center, where you can find information about the Land Ends area as well as a pretty decent gift shop and cafe. The lookout also contains the statue of Diana that once stood in neighboring Sutro Heights, which was relocated inside of the lookout after it was extensively vandalized.
9AM-5PM daily
SeeThe Avenues
Sutro Heights Park
On the hill above the Cliff House is the former grounds of the estate of Adolph Sutro, the wealthy landowner who built the Cliff House and Sutro Baths. Today the mansion is gone, but the beautifully landscaped grounds remain as a public park, with splendid views over the coastline and down to Golden Gate Park. Nestled within the foundations of the old mansion is a WW2 era bunker.
Free
SeeThe Avenues
USS San Francisco Memorial
Perched above the Coastal Trail is this longtime WWII memorial crafted out of pieces of the USS San Francisco, a heavy cruiser that sustained heavy damage in the Battle of Guadalcanal and was scrapped after the war. The memorial contains a section of the ship's shell-ridden hull.
Free