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Photo: Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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.
The Cliff House is a neo-classical style building perched on the headland above the cliffs just north of Ocean Beach. Located on the West Side of San Francisco in the city's Outer Richmond neighborhood, the building overlooks the site of the Sutro Baths ruins, Seal Rocks, and is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and operated by the National Park Service (NPS). The Cliff House is owned by the NPS; the building's terrace hosts a room-sized camera obscura.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Once used for park irrigation in the past, now a scenic oddity at the western end of the park. A lesser-known windmill, the Murphy Windmill, is located at the southwestern corner of the park, but is under restoration. Near the windmills is the lovely Queen Wilhelmina Tulip Garden.
A beautiful 1930s building, the Beach Chalet is open for lunch, drinks, or dinner overlooking Ocean Beach and its brave surfers. Inside the Park Chalet are some exhibits with artifacts related to the history of the Golden Gate Park and San Francisco.