San Francisco's largest park, Golden Gate Park covers more than 1,013 acres and is 3 miles long by 1/2-mile wide, larger than New York City's Central Park. Once nothing more than barren sand dunes, Golden Gate Park owes its existence to tenacious Scotsman John McLaren, who created the landscape we see today in the late 1800s, a task many thought impossible. Today, the park is home to two of the city's premiere museums, the De Young art museum and the California Academy of Sciences, the Japanese Tea Garden, an outdoor botanical garden, the Conservatory of Flowers, lots of open space and it even has its own resident buffalo herd.