California

Before Europeans arrived, California was one of the most densely populated and linguistically diverse parts of North America, home to peoples including the Chumash of the Santa Barbara coast, the Tongva of the Los Angeles basin, the Ohlone around San Francisco Bay, the Miwok of the Sierra foothills, the Pomo and Yurok in the north and the Kumeyaay around San Diego. Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed into San Diego Bay in 1542, but Spain only settled in 1769, when Franciscan friars led by Junípero Serra founded the first of 21 missions along El Camino Real, backed by presidios at San Diego, Monterey and San Francisco. The missions forced Native converts into labour, and disease devastated their communities.

California became part of Mexico in 1821, and great cattle ranchos later replaced mission lands. In 1846 American settlers raised the Bear Flag at Sonoma, and the United States seized California in the Mexican–American War. Gold was found at Sutter's Mill in January 1848, weeks before the treaty ending the war, and the Gold Rush drew hundreds of thousands of people, turning San Francisco into a city and making California a state in 1850. For Native Californians it was a catastrophe: violence, including state-funded militia campaigns, disease and starvation cut their numbers drastically within two decades, which the state's governor formally described as genocide in a 2019 apology.

Chinese workers built the Central Pacific Railroad and then faced exclusion laws. The 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed much of San Francisco, and film-makers settled in Hollywood from the 1910s. In 1942 Japanese Americans were removed from the coast and held in camps such as Manzanar and Tule Lake. Aerospace and war industries, freeways and suburbs followed, then the Berkeley protests, the farmworkers' movement of Cesar Chavez, the growth of Silicon Valley, and in recent years increasingly destructive wildfires, from the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise in 2018 to the Los Angeles fires of January 2025.

No single ethnic group forms a majority in California. Latinos are the largest group, Spanish is heard everywhere, and Mexican-American culture shapes everything from food to murals and Día de los Muertos celebrations. The state also has the country's largest Asian American population, with San Francisco's Chinatown, the Vietnamese Little Saigon of Orange County, Los Angeles's Koreatown and Filipino and Indian communities across the Bay Area.

The state has long exported its culture to the world through Hollywood films and television, surf and skate culture, car culture, and a music scene running from the Beach Boys to West Coast hip-hop. San Francisco became the centre of the 1960s counterculture and of the gay rights movement, and its Pride parade is held each June. Politically the coastal cities lean strongly Democratic while parts of the inland valleys and the far north are conservative, and ballot propositions let voters decide many questions directly.

The calendar includes the Rose Parade in Pasadena on New Year's Day, Lunar New Year parades, San Diego's Comic-Con and the Coachella music festival in the desert near Indio. The rivalry between northern and southern California, San Francisco against Los Angeles, plays out in baseball between the Giants and the Dodgers and in endless comparisons of weather, traffic and attitude.

About 39 million people live in California, more than in any other state. Los Angeles has about 3.8 million in a metropolitan area of around 13 million; San Diego has about 1.4 million, San Jose around a million and San Francisco around 800,000, while Fresno and the state capital, Sacramento, each have over 500,000. Much of life is suburban, lived along freeways between home, work and school.

If it were a country, California's economy would rank among the largest in the world. Silicon Valley, between San Francisco and San Jose, is home to Apple, Google and Meta and the heart of the artificial-intelligence boom; Los Angeles has the film, television and music industries; the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach handle much of the country's trade with Asia; and the Central Valley grows a large share of the country's fruit, vegetables and nuts, including most of its almonds.

The state's pressing issues are cost and risk. Housing prices are among the highest in the country, California has the largest homeless population of any state, and many residents have moved to cheaper states. Drought and water allocation, home insurers pulling back from fire-prone areas, and the knowledge that a large earthquake will eventually strike are all part of daily conversation. Los Angeles is due to host the Summer Olympics in 2028.

California cooking prizes fresh produce, and the state grows avocados, artichokes, citrus, strawberries, tomatoes and dates in quantity. Alice Waters' Chez Panisse in Berkeley, opened in 1971, made seasonal, locally grown ingredients the basis of what became known as California cuisine, and farmers' markets are part of weekly life.

Mexican food is everyday food: San Diego is known for fish tacos in the Baja style and the California burrito, filled with carne asada and chips; San Francisco's Mission district gave its name to a huge rice-and-bean Mission burrito; and Los Angeles has street taco trucks, and Korean-Mexican fusion tacos. San Francisco also has sourdough bread, Dungeness crab, and cioppino, a tomato-based seafood stew created by Italian fishermen. The Cobb salad is credited to Hollywood's Brown Derby restaurant, Santa Maria on the Central Coast is known for tri-tip beef grilled over oak, and In-N-Out burgers are a Southern California institution.

Wine is California's most famous product. Napa Valley is known above all for Cabernet Sauvignon, and neighbouring Sonoma for Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Zinfandel; their wines' success at the 1976 blind tasting known as the Judgement of Paris put California on the world wine map. Paso Robles, Santa Barbara County and the Sierra foothills also make wine, and the state has a large craft-beer and coffee culture.

Los Angeles is spread across a huge basin: the Hollywood sign and Walk of Fame, the Griffith Observatory, the Getty Center's art and gardens, the Santa Monica Pier and Venice Beach boardwalk, and film-studio tours in Burbank, with Disneyland in Anaheim to the south-east. San Francisco packs the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, the cable cars, Chinatown, Fisherman's Wharf and the Victorian houses of its hills into a small peninsula, with the Muir Woods redwoods across the bridge.

The Pacific Coast Highway follows the shore for much of the state; its finest stretch runs through Big Sur, between Carmel and San Simeon, past Bixby Creek Bridge and McWay Falls, with the Monterey Bay Aquarium to the north and Hearst Castle to the south. Further south lie Santa Barbara's mission and red-roofed old town. San Diego has Balboa Park and its zoo, the Old Town, the aircraft carrier USS Midway and the sea cliffs of La Jolla. North of the bay, Napa and Sonoma's wineries fill two parallel valleys, and Redwood National Park protects some of the tallest trees on earth in the far north.

In the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite Valley holds El Capitan, Half Dome and Yosemite Falls, with giant sequoias in the Mariposa Grove; Sequoia National Park, to the south, has the General Sherman tree, and Mount Whitney is the highest peak in the contiguous United States. Lake Tahoe, straddling the Nevada line, is a summer lake resort and a winter ski area. East of the mountains, Death Valley holds Badwater Basin, about 86 metres below sea level, and the sand dunes and salt flats around Furnace Creek, where 134°F was recorded in 1913. Joshua Tree National Park and Palm Springs lie in the southern deserts.