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Though it’s a mere five-minute drive across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, Marin County is a world of its own, with a landscape and character very different from the city by the Bay.
Geographically, the county is bounded mostly by water: the Pacific Ocean to the west, San Francisco Bay to the south, and San Pablo Bay to the east. The only land border is with the rolling hills and vineyards of Sonoma County to the north. The western half of the county is largely farmland, protected coast and wilderness, dotted with unincorporated communities whose livelihoods depend on agriculture and tourism. The much more heavily populated eastern side contains the county’s commercial and cultural centers.
Marin gained fame in the latter half of the 20th century as a place of hot tub hedonists with a penchant for progressive politics, yoga and Zen. That reputation remains today, with multimillion-dollar eco-mansions tucked into its verdant slopes and community gatherings where tech titans and trust fund babies rub elbows with dairy ranchers and boho artists.
Here’s a look at some of Marin’s distinctive towns and treasures.
Sausalito
Sometimes called the Riviera of California, Sausalito, population 7,000, is a hilly bayside town that mixes upscale boutiques and restaurants with a salty community of houseboat residents and scruffy writers and painters who settled after World War II. Linked with San Francisco via a fabulous 30-minute ferry ride (or a 25-minute drive from downtown), the town welcomes a daily deluge of visitors from around the globe. The main street that runs along the water, Bridgeway, is frequently filled with a United Nations chorus of iPhone-toting tourists speaking Italian, French, Spanish, Russian, Australian, Tagalog, Korean, Chinese and more.
