🇺🇸 United States · West Coast and California
San Jose is California's third most populous city and the heart of Silicon Valley, the most influential tech region in the world. Although it tends to be overshadowed by nearby San Francisco, it is in fact the largest city in the Bay Area and a destination with a personality of its own: sunshine almost all year, Hispanic roots (it was the first civilian town in Spanish California), quirky museums and a good launch pad for exploring the bay and the coast.
More than big tourist icons, San Jose is a city for getting to know the culture of innovation —with The Tech Interactive and the campuses of nearby tech giants—, for adding curiosities such as the enigmatic Winchester Mystery House, for enjoying an excellent and diverse food scene (with a strong Latin and Asian imprint) and for using as a sunny, affordable base to visit San Francisco, the Pacific coast or the mountains.
This guide walks you through the essentials of San Jose with a practical eye: what to see downtown and in its museums, the famous Winchester Mystery House, what it has to do with Silicon Valley, where to eat, how to get around and connect with the rest of the Bay Area, and when to go. San Jose is the sunny, Hispanic and tech-driven face of northern California.
Founded by the Spanish in 1777 as the Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, it was the first civilian settlement (neither mission nor fort) in Alta California. After being Mexican, it passed to the United States with the war of 1846-1848 and, during the gold rush, it was the first capital of the state of California (1849-1851). In the 20th century, the Santa Clara Valley —once agricultural and famous for its orchards— was transformed into Silicon Valley, the world's tech hub. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The golden state of the Pacific: land of dozens of Native peoples and of the Franciscan missions, forged by the gold rush of 1849, today the largest economy in the United States and the cradle of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and legendary parks such as Yosemite and Sequoia.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
For more than a century, the valley where San Jose stands today was known as the 'Valley of Heart's Delight': a sea of plum, apricot and cherry orchards that in spring turned white and pink with blossom, the largest fruit-growing center in the world. It is hard to imagine that this same soil would, in barely a few decades of the 20th century, become Silicon Valley, the technological heart of the planet. But San Jose's story begins long before the chips, with a town of farmers.
Before the Spanish arrived, the Santa Clara Valley was inhabited by the Ohlone, Indigenous peoples who lived by hunting, fishing and gathering in a fertile setting beside the bay. On that territory, in 1777 the Spanish crown founded the Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, an event with a special significance: it was the first civilian town (a settlement of colonists devoted to agriculture) established in Alta California, unlike the religious missions and military presidios that dominated Spanish colonization in the region.
The idea was that San José would supply food —grain, livestock— to the presidios and missions in the area, such as those of San Francisco and Monterey. Its first inhabitants were colonist families who came from the northwest of New Spain. The town grew slowly as a farming community around its croplands, watered by the Guadalupe River.
After Mexican independence in 1821, San José became part of the Mexican territory of Alta California. It remained a modest ranching and farming town, organized around its plaza, in a remote and sparsely populated California. That founding Hispanic root —being the first civilian town in California— is something the city takes pride in and it explains part of its Latino identity, still very much present.
San Jose's fate changed dramatically in the mid-19th century. In 1848, after the war between the United States and Mexico, California passed to U.S. sovereignty with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. And that same year the California gold rush broke out: the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada set off an avalanche of fortune seekers from all over the world that transformed the region from top to bottom.
In that context of dizzying growth, San Jose played a brief but historic role: it was the first capital of the state of California. When California officially became a state of the Union in 1850, its first legislature met in San Jose between 1849 and 1851, before the capital moved —by way of Vallejo and Benicia— to its definitive seat in Sacramento.
Through the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the Santa Clara Valley around San Jose established itself as one of the richest farming regions in the country. Its fertile soils and sunny climate turned it into an immense orchard of fruit trees —plums, cherries, apricots— to the point of being known as the 'Valley of Heart's Delight' for its seas of trees in bloom. Few imagined then that those orchards would be transformed, within a few decades, into the most famous technology hub on the planet.
San Jose's great transformation came in the second half of the 20th century, when the valley of orchards became Silicon Valley, cradle of the technological revolution. The roots of the phenomenon lie around Stanford University, in nearby Palo Alto, whose ties with industry and the push of academic figures encouraged the creation of tech companies in the area from mid-century onward.
The term 'Silicon Valley' refers to the material used to make semiconductor chips, which were the region's first great engine. From the 1950s and 1960s onward, semiconductor and electronics firms flourished, and later, with the arrival of personal computers, the internet and software, the valley became the world epicenter of technological innovation, home to some of the most valuable companies on earth.
In that process San Jose —the largest city in the valley— grew explosively, going from farming town to a major metropolis and one of the most populous cities in California. Today it combines its Hispanic and agricultural past with its technological, multicultural and prosperous present. The orchards of old have almost entirely disappeared beneath neighborhoods, freeways and campuses, but the city preserves, in its name and in its Latino culture, the memory of that first civilian town in Spanish California.
Long before 1777, San Francisco Bay and the Santa Clara Valley were home to the Ohlone (also called Costanoans by the Spanish), a set of Indigenous peoples organized into small autonomous tribes —such as the Tamien, who lived precisely in the area where San Jose would later be founded— who spoke related languages and shared a way of life based on hunting, fishing in the bay and the estuaries, and gathering acorns, seeds and wild plants.
The Ohlone lived in semi-permanent villages of tule houses (tule is a bulrush) beside creeks and wetlands, in a territory rich in natural resources: the bay provided shellfish and waterbirds, and the valley a remarkable variety of flora and fauna. It is estimated that, before European contact, tens of thousands of Ohlone people lived in the bay region across hundreds of villages.
The arrival of the Spanish, with the founding of the missions (such as Mission Santa Clara de Asís, in 1777, very close to the new Pueblo de San José) and of the civilian town itself, brought a devastating demographic and cultural collapse for the Ohlone: forced relocation to the missions, diseases brought from Europe (to which they had no immunity) and the loss of their lands and way of life decimated the population within a few decades. Today, various Ohlone communities and organizations work to preserve and recover their language, their culture and recognition of their continuing presence in the bay region.
The growth of Silicon Valley was not a straight line. In the late 1990s, the so-called 'dot-com bubble' —a speculative euphoria around internet companies— sent the region's economy to unprecedented levels, with San Jose right at the center of that boom, until the bubble burst in 2000-2001, causing a sharp local recession, mass layoffs and the collapse of numerous start-ups. The city, however, recovered, and in the following decades it cemented its place as one of the most important economic engines in the world, with the consolidation of giants such as Cisco, eBay and Adobe and, later, the enormous influence of neighboring companies such as Apple, Google and Meta, which although not headquartered in San Jose itself depend on its workforce and its setting.
That growth brought profound social transformations with it. San Jose became one of the most expensive cities to live in in the United States, with a severe housing crisis produced by very high tech salaries and a shortage of construction, which generated significant social tensions and a visible inequality between tech wealth and the working communities, many of them of Latino and Asian origin, that sustain much of the city's everyday economy.
At the same time, San Jose reaffirmed its identity as one of the most diverse cities in the United States: it is home to one of the largest Vietnamese communities in the country (with the unofficial name of 'Little Saigon' in part of the city), a historic Japantown —one of the three that survive in the country— and a strong Mexican and Latin American presence that connects directly with its founding roots of 1777. Today the city presents itself, proudly, as 'the capital of Silicon Valley': a place where the world's technological cutting edge lives alongside century-old immigrant communities and an agricultural, Hispanic past that can still be traced in its streets, its squares and its festivals.