Three colonial powers and the US military have held this ground in an unbroken line for 250 years, and you're walking it now. The Presidio was established by Spanish colonial soldiers in 1776, the same year the mission was founded, as the military garrison for Alta California. The Spanish built a simple adobe fort here overlooking the Golden Gate.
Mexico inherited it in 1821 when it won independence from Spain, and the United States seized it in 1846 during the Mexican-American War. The Army occupied the Presidio continuously until 1994, making it one of the longest-used military posts in American history. Crissy Field, the broad tidal marsh you see before you, was filled in and paved as an airfield in 1919, one of the first military air stations on the West Coast.
When the Presidio became a National Park in 1994, the asphalt was torn up and the marsh was painstakingly restored to its original wetland character, a project completed in 2001 that returned native plants and shorebirds to the edge of the bay. The view from here — the Golden Gate Bridge framed by the headlands of Marin — is one of the most photographed scenes in California.