7 Best Sights in The Bay Area, California

This combined art museum, repertory movie theater, and film archive, known for its extensive collection of some 28,000 works of art and 18,000 films and videos, is now also home to the world's largest collection of African American quilts, thanks to the bequest of art scholar Eli Leon. Artworks span five centuries and include modernist notables Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, David Smith, and Hans Hofmann. The Pacific Film Archive includes the largest selection of Japanese films outside Japan and specializes in international films, offering regular screenings, programs, and performances.

Sitting on 7½ acres of national park land at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, this indoor-outdoor nonprofit children’s museum offers entertaining and enlightening hands-on exhibits for younger children. Kids can stretch their creativity and develop early STEM skills as they navigate wind tunnels, fish from a boat at the indoor wharf, configure oversized foam blocks in the Imagination Playground, and play outdoors among the tide pools, gravel pits, shipwrecks, and caves of Lookout Cove. At the multisensory Tot Spot, toddlers and preschoolers dress up in animal costumes and crawl through miniature tunnels.

This one-of-a-kind education center focuses on a sprawling 1½-acre model of the entire San Francisco Bay and Sacramento–San Joaquin River delta system, complete with flowing water. Now open for public exploration, the model has been used by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to reproduce the rise and fall of tides, the flow of currents, and the other physical forces at work on the bay.

Fascinating if dated, this museum showcases the largest collection of authentic ancient Egyptian artifacts on display in Western North America. Walk through a tunnel to reach a hidden burial chamber lined with murals, see a mummy more than 2,500 years old, try to figure out which animal mummies aren't what they appear to be, take a tomb tour, and learn about games ancient Egyptian children played. If that's not enough, the planetarium shows space films.

Nearly 2,500 modern and contemporary artworks by cutting-edge West Coast and Latino artists are featured in this downtown museum. Bay Area figurative painting, photography, and sculpture are also well represented, and, not surprising given the museum's proximity to Silicon Valley, new-media works are often exhibited.

At this hands-on, high-tech science museum, kids can engineer multicolored bacteria, attempt to steer themselves in a vehicle like ones astronauts use for forays outside the space station, experience earthquakes of different magnitudes, or design, build, and program a robot. The on-site domed IMAX theater shows a mix of nature programs and Hollywood blockbusters. Take a quick swing through the museum during the last hour and get a discounted rate.