San Jose is the third-most populous city in California after Los Angeles and San Diego, and is the county seat of Santa Clara County. With an estimated population of 953,000, San Jose is also the largest city in Northern California.

San Jose was the first town in the Spanish colony of Nueva California, founded in 1777. It served as the first capital of California after it gained statehood in 1850. 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.

The official name of the city is The City of San José, but is more commonly spelled without the diacritical mark above the “e”.

For nearly two centuries a farming community, San Jose produced a significant amount of fruits and vegetables until the 1960s, and many past and current names of teams, streets, buildings, and so on reflect its agricultural beginnings. Prunes, grapes, broccoli and apricots were some of the major crops.

IBM built its west coast headquarters in San Jose in 1943, and the city currently houses many technology companies, among them Flextronics, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi and Lockheed Martin.  Cost of living is very high, but San Jose households have the highest disposable income of any large American city.