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San Jose is the third-largest city in California, and the tenth-largest in
the United States. It is the county seat of Santa Clara County. For the past
several years, it has held the title of The Safest Big City in America.[4][5]
San Jose is located in Silicon Valley, at the south end of the San Francisco
Bay. With a population of 953,679, San Jose is the largest city in Northern
California.[6] Once a small farming city, by 1950 San Jose was a magnet for
suburban newcomers in new housing developments (1960s to the 1990s) and became a
large thriving urban center of Northern California. San Jose is sometimes
nicknamed L.A. North which points out its similarity to Los Angeles as of the
end of the 20th century.
Originally known as El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, it was founded on
November 29, 1777 as the first town in the Spanish colony of Nueva California,
which later became Alta California. The city served as a farming community to
support Spanish military installations at San Francisco and Monterey. After
California gained statehood in 1850, San Jose served as its first capital. After
over 150 years as an agricultural center, increased demand for housing from
soldiers and other veterans returning from World War II and starting families,
as well as aggressive expansion during the 1950s and 1960s led to San Jose being
a bedroom community for Silicon Valley in the 1970s, which attracted more
businesses to the city. By the 1990s, San Jose's central location within the
booming technology industry in the area earned the city the nickname as the
Capital of Silicon Valley.
On April 3, 1979, the city council adopted San José as the spelling of the city
name on the city seal and official stationery; however, the name is still more
commonly spelled without the diacritical mark. The official name of the city is
The City of San José. In the late 1980's after four decades of spectacular
development and population growth, San José surpassed San Francisco as the third
most populous city in California. Some demographers predict that by the 2010
census San José will have supplanted San Diego as the second most populous city
in the state.
San Jose, like most of the Bay Area, has a Mediterranean climate tempered by the
presence of the San Francisco Bay. Unlike San Francisco, which is exposed to the
ocean or Bay on three sides and whose temperature therefore varies relatively
little year-round and overnight, San Jose lies more inland, protected on three
sides by mountains. This shelters the city from rain and makes it more of a
semiarid, near-desert area, with a mean annual rainfall of only 14.4 inches (366
mm), compared to some other parts of the Bay Area, which can get up to four
times that amount. It also avoids San Francisco's omnipresent fog most of the
year.
However, temperatures are generally moderate. January's average high is 59 °F
(15 °C) and average low is 42 °F (6 °C), with overnight freezes several nights
each year; July's average high is 84 °F (29 °C) and average low is 58 °F (14
°C), with heat exceeding 100 °F (38 °C) several days each year. The highest
temperature ever recorded in San Jose was 109 °F (42.8 °C) on June 14, 2000; the
lowest was 17 °F (-8.3 °C) on January 9, 1920 and January 10, 1920. Temperatures
between night and day can vary by 30 or 40 °F (17 to 22 °C).
With the light rainfall, San Jose experiences over 300 days a year of full or
significant sunshine. Rain occurs primarily in the months from October through
April or May, with hardly any rainfall from June through September. During the
winter, hillsides and fields turn green with grasses and vegetation, although
deciduous trees are bare; with the coming of the annual summer dry period, the
vegetation dies and dries, giving the hills a golden cover, which some find
beautiful but which also provides fuel for frequent grass fires.
The snow level drops as low as 2,000 ft (610 m) above sea level, or lower,
occasionally each winter, coating nearby Mount Hamilton, and less frequently the
Santa Cruz Mountains, with snow that normally lasts a few days. This sometimes
snarls traffic traveling on State Route 17 towards Santa Cruz. Snow occasionally
falls in San Jose, but until recently, the most recent snow to remain on the
ground was in February of 1976 when many residents around the city saw as much
as 3 inches on car and roof tops. However, in March of 2006, a smaller amount,
up to one inch of snow fell in downtown San Jose as well as other areas around
the city at elevations of only 90 feet to 200 feet above sea level.
Again, like most of the Bay Area, San Jose is made up of dozens of
microclimates. Downtown San Jose experiences the lightest rainfall in the city,
while South San Jose, only 10 miles (16 km) distant, experiences more rainfall
and slightly more extreme temperatures.