3 Best Sights in San Francisco, California

Two churches stand side by side here: a newer multi-domed basilica and the small adobe Mission San Francisco de Asís, the latter being the city's oldest standing structure along with the Presidio Officers' Club. Completed in 1791, it's the sixth of the 21 California missions founded by Franciscan friars in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Its ceiling depicts original Ohlone Indian basket designs, executed in vegetable dyes. The tiny chapel includes frescoes and a hand-painted wooden altar.

There's a hidden treasure here: a 20-by-22-foot mural with images including a dagger-pierced Sacred Heart of Jesus, painted with natural dyes by Native Americans in 1791, was found in 2004 behind the altar. Interesting fact: Mission San Francisco de Asís was founded on June 29, 1776, five days before the Declaration of Independence was signed.

The small museum in the mission complex covers its founding and history, and the pretty cemetery—which appears in Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo—contains the graves of mid-19th-century European immigrants. The remains of an estimated 5,000 Native Americans who died at the mission lie in unmarked graves.

Dedicated in 1854, this church served as the city's Catholic cathedral until 1891. The verse below the massive clock face beseeched naughty Barbary Coast boys: "Son, observe the time and fly from evil." Across the street from the church in St. Mary's Square, a Beniamino Bufano statue of Sun Yat-sen towers over the site of the Chinese leader's favorite reading spot during his years in San Francisco. On Tuesdays at 12:30 pm, the church hosts free chamber music concerts ( noontimeconcerts.org). A surprisingly peaceful spot, St. Mary's Square also has a couple of small, well-kept playgrounds, perfect for a break from the hustle and bustle of Chinatown.

A light-green pastiche of colonial, Queen Anne, Moorish, and Hindu opulence, with turrets battling red-top onion domes and Victorian detailing everywhere, this 1905 structure is considered the first Hindu temple in the West. Vedanta, an underlying philosophy of Hinduism, maintains that all religions are paths to one goal. It's an interesting building to study from the street.