El Granada, California
El Granada is a census-designated place in the coastal area of northern San Mateo County, United States. The population was 5,467 at the 2010 census. El Granada is located at 37°30′14″N 122°28′24″W, on the less densely populated Pacific coast side of San Mateo County 25 miles south of San Francisco and 45 miles north of Santa Cruz, California. Neighboring towns include Moss Beach to the north and Half Moon Bay to the south. According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP has a total area of 4.8 square miles, all of it land. The 2010 United States Census reported that El Granada had a population of 5,467; the population density was 1,133.7 people per square mile. The racial makeup of El Granada was 4,608 White, 45 African American, 38 Native American, 190 Asian, 5 Pacific Islander, 336 from other races, 245 from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 813 persons; the Census reported that 5,453 people lived in households, 14 lived in non-institutionalized group quarters, 0 were institutionalized.
There were 2,098 households, out of which 660 had children under the age of 18 living in them, 1,245 were opposite-sex married couples living together, 163 had a female householder with no husband present, 69 had a male householder with no wife present. There were 132 unmarried opposite-sex partnerships, 33 same-sex married couples or partnerships. 420 households were made up of individuals and 124 had someone living alone, 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.60. There were 1,477 families; the population was spread out with 1,199 people under the age of 18, 314 people aged 18 to 24, 1,269 people aged 25 to 44, 2,106 people aged 45 to 64, 579 people who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 44.5 years. For every 100 females, there were 96.4 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 95.3 males. There were 2,198 housing units at an average density of 455.8 per square mile, of which 1,592 were owner-occupied, 506 were occupied by renters. The homeowner vacancy rate was 0.7%.
4,205 people lived in owner-occupied housing units and 1,248 people lived in rental housing units. As of the census of 2000, there were 5,724 people, 2,028 households, 1,512 families residing in the CDP; the population density was 1,062.7 people per square mile. There were 2,097 housing units at an average density of 389.3 per square mile. The racial makeup of the CDP in 2010 was 77.0% non-Hispanic White, 0.6% non-Hispanic African American, 0.3% Native American, 3.4% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 0.3% from other races, 3.3% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 14.9% of the population. There were 2,028 households out of which 39.3% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 61.8% were married couples living together, 8.2% had a female householder with no husband present, 25.4% were non-families. 17.8% of all households were made up of individuals and 2.9% had someone living alone, 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.82 and the average family size was 3.18.
In the CDP, the population was spread out with 26.8% under the age of 18, 6.0% from 18 to 24, 31.7% from 25 to 44, 29.1% from 45 to 64, 6.4% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 38 years. For every 100 females, there were 102.1 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 99.8 males. The median income for a household in the CDP was $91,979, the median income for a family was $96,095. Males had a median income of $54,122 versus $48,065 for females; the per capita income for the CDP was $38,832. About 1.1% of families and 3.0% of the population were below the poverty line, including 3.0% of those under age 18 and 7.3% of those age 65 or over. El Granada's unusual concentric-circular street layout was designed by the influential architect and city planner Daniel Burnham. Burnham's other works included overseeing the design for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and designing the 1902 Flatiron Building in New York City. Burnham's plan was commissioned by the Ocean Shore Railroad, which developed El Granada as a seaside resort for visitors from San Francisco.
He developed city plans for San Francisco, Chicago and the Mall in Washington D. C, his company designed many noteworthy buildings in Chicago, San Francisco and other cities in the US. He is buried on an island with his family under granite boulders in Chicago. In the California State Legislature, El Granada is in the 13th Senate District, represented by Democrat Jerry Hill, in the 24th Assembly District, represented by Democrat Marc Berman. Federally, El Granada is in California's 14th congressional district, represented by Democrat Jackie Speier. Coastsider, Coastal San Mateo County news site
2010 United States Census
The 2010 United States Census is the twenty-third and most recent United States national census. National Census Day, the reference day used for the census, was April 1, 2010; the census was taken via mail-in citizen self-reporting, with enumerators serving to spot-check randomly selected neighborhoods and communities. As part of a drive to increase the count's accuracy, 635,000 temporary enumerators were hired; the population of the United States was counted as 308,745,538, a 9.7% increase from the 2000 Census. This was the first census in which all states recorded a population of over half a million, as well as the first in which all 100 largest cities recorded populations of over 200,000; as required by the United States Constitution, the U. S. census has been conducted every 10 years since 1790. The 2000 U. S. Census was the previous census completed. Participation in the U. S. Census is required by law in Title 13 of the United States Code. On January 25, 2010, Census Bureau Director Robert Groves inaugurated the 2010 Census enumeration by counting World War II veteran Clifton Jackson, a resident of Noorvik, Alaska.
More than 120 million census forms were delivered by the U. S. Post Office beginning March 15, 2010; the number of forms mailed out or hand-delivered by the Census Bureau was 134 million on April 1, 2010. Although the questionnaire used April 1, 2010 as the reference date as to where a person was living, an insert dated March 15, 2010 included the following printed in bold type: "Please complete and mail back the enclosed census form today." The 2010 Census national mail participation rate was 74%. From April through July 2010, census takers visited households that did not return a form, an operation called "non-response follow-up". In December 2010, the U. S. Census Bureau delivered population information to the U. S. President for apportionment, in March 2011, complete redistricting data was delivered to states. Identifiable information will be available in 2082; the Census Bureau did not use a long form for the 2010 Census. In several previous censuses, one in six households received this long form, which asked for detailed social and economic information.
The 2010 Census used only a short form asking ten basic questions: How many people were living or staying in this house, apartment, or mobile home on April 1, 2010? Were there any additional people staying here on April 1, 2010 that you did not include in Question 1? Mark all that apply: Is this house, apartment, or mobile home – What is your telephone number? What is Person 1's name? What is Person 1's sex? What is Person 1's age and Person 1's date of birth? Is Person 1 of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin? What is Person 1's race? Does Person 1 sometimes live or stay somewhere else? The form included space to repeat all of these questions for up to twelve residents total. In contrast to the 2000 census, an Internet response option was not offered, nor was the form available for download. Detailed socioeconomic information collected during past censuses will continue to be collected through the American Community Survey; the survey provides data about communities in the United States on a 1-year or 3-year cycle, depending on the size of the community, rather than once every 10 years.
A small percentage of the population on a rotating basis will receive the survey each year, no household will receive it more than once every five years. In June 2009, the U. S. Census Bureau announced. However, the final form did not contain a separate "same-sex married couple" option; when noting the relationship between household members, same-sex couples who are married could mark their spouses as being "Husband or wife", the same response given by opposite-sex married couples. An "unmarried partner" option was available for couples; the 2010 census cost $13 billion $42 per capita. Operational costs were $5.4 billion under the $7 billion budget. In December 2010 the Government Accountability Office noted that the cost of conducting the census has doubled each decade since 1970. In a detailed 2004 report to Congress, the GAO called on the Census Bureau to address cost and design issues, at that time, had estimated the 2010 Census cost to be $11 billion. In August 2010, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced that the census operational costs came in under budget.
Locke credited the management practices of Census Bureau director Robert Groves, citing in particular the decision to buy additional advertising in locations where responses lagged, which improved the overall response rate. The agency has begun to rely more on questioning neighbors or other reliable third parties when a person could not be reached at home, which reduced the cost of follow-up visits. Census data for about 22% of U. S. househol
Geographic coordinate system
A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position and two or three of the numbers represent a horizontal position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude and elevation. To specify a location on a plane requires a map projection; the invention of a geographic coordinate system is credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who composed his now-lost Geography at the Library of Alexandria in the 3rd century BC. A century Hipparchus of Nicaea improved on this system by determining latitude from stellar measurements rather than solar altitude and determining longitude by timings of lunar eclipses, rather than dead reckoning. In the 1st or 2nd century, Marinus of Tyre compiled an extensive gazetteer and mathematically-plotted world map using coordinates measured east from a prime meridian at the westernmost known land, designated the Fortunate Isles, off the coast of western Africa around the Canary or Cape Verde Islands, measured north or south of the island of Rhodes off Asia Minor.
Ptolemy credited him with the full adoption of longitude and latitude, rather than measuring latitude in terms of the length of the midsummer day. Ptolemy's 2nd-century Geography used the same prime meridian but measured latitude from the Equator instead. After their work was translated into Arabic in the 9th century, Al-Khwārizmī's Book of the Description of the Earth corrected Marinus' and Ptolemy's errors regarding the length of the Mediterranean Sea, causing medieval Arabic cartography to use a prime meridian around 10° east of Ptolemy's line. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes' recovery of Ptolemy's text a little before 1300. In 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England as the zero-reference line; the Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while Brazil abstained. France adopted Greenwich Mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911.
In order to be unambiguous about the direction of "vertical" and the "horizontal" surface above which they are measuring, map-makers choose a reference ellipsoid with a given origin and orientation that best fits their need for the area they are mapping. They choose the most appropriate mapping of the spherical coordinate system onto that ellipsoid, called a terrestrial reference system or geodetic datum. Datums may be global, meaning that they represent the whole Earth, or they may be local, meaning that they represent an ellipsoid best-fit to only a portion of the Earth. Points on the Earth's surface move relative to each other due to continental plate motion and diurnal Earth tidal movement caused by the Moon and the Sun; this daily movement can be as much as a metre. Continental movement can be up to 10 m in a century. A weather system high-pressure area can cause a sinking of 5 mm. Scandinavia is rising by 1 cm a year as a result of the melting of the ice sheets of the last ice age, but neighbouring Scotland is rising by only 0.2 cm.
These changes are insignificant if a local datum is used, but are statistically significant if a global datum is used. Examples of global datums include World Geodetic System, the default datum used for the Global Positioning System, the International Terrestrial Reference Frame, used for estimating continental drift and crustal deformation; the distance to Earth's center can be used both for deep positions and for positions in space. Local datums chosen by a national cartographical organisation include the North American Datum, the European ED50, the British OSGB36. Given a location, the datum provides the latitude ϕ and longitude λ. In the United Kingdom there are three common latitude and height systems in use. WGS 84 differs at Greenwich from the one used on published maps OSGB36 by 112 m; the military system ED50, used by NATO, differs from about 120 m to 180 m. The latitude and longitude on a map made against a local datum may not be the same as one obtained from a GPS receiver. Coordinates from the mapping system can sometimes be changed into another datum using a simple translation.
For example, to convert from ETRF89 to the Irish Grid add 49 metres to the east, subtract 23.4 metres from the north. More one datum is changed into any other datum using a process called Helmert transformations; this involves converting the spherical coordinates into Cartesian coordinates and applying a seven parameter transformation, converting back. In popular GIS software, data projected in latitude/longitude is represented as a Geographic Coordinate System. For example, data in latitude/longitude if the datum is the North American Datum of 1983 is denoted by'GCS North American 1983'; the "latitude" of a point on Earth's surface is the angle between the equatorial plane and the straight line that passes through that point and through the center of the Earth. Lines joining points of the same latitude trace circles on the surface of Earth called parallels, as they are parallel to the Equator and to each other; the North Pole is 90° N. The 0° parallel of latitude is designated the Equator, the fun
Time zone
A time zone is a region of the globe that observes a uniform standard time for legal and social purposes. Time zones tend to follow the boundaries of countries and their subdivisions because it is convenient for areas in close commercial or other communication to keep the same time. Most of the time zones on land are offset from Coordinated Universal Time by a whole number of hours, but a few zones are offset by 30 or 45 minutes; some higher latitude and temperate zone countries use daylight saving time for part of the year by adjusting local clock time by an hour. Many land time zones are skewed toward the west of the corresponding nautical time zones; this creates a permanent daylight saving time effect. Before clocks were first invented, it was common practice to mark the time of day with apparent solar time – for example, the time on a sundial –, different for every location and dependent on longitude; when well-regulated mechanical clocks became widespread in the early 19th century, each city began to use some local mean solar time.
Apparent and mean solar time can differ by up to around 15 minutes because of the elliptical shape of the Earth's orbit around the Sun and the tilt of the Earth's axis. Mean solar time has days of equal length, the difference between the two sums to zero after a year. Greenwich Mean Time was established in 1675, when the Royal Observatory was built, as an aid to mariners to determine longitude at sea, providing a standard reference time while each city in England kept a different local time. Local solar time became inconvenient as rail transport and telecommunications improved, because clocks differed between places by amounts corresponding to the differences in their geographical longitudes, which varied by four minutes of time for every degree of longitude. For example, Bristol is about 2.5 degrees west of Greenwich, so when it is solar noon in Bristol, it is about 10 minutes past solar noon in London. The use of time zones accumulates these differences into longer units hours, so that nearby places can share a common standard for timekeeping.
The first adoption of a standard time was on December 1, 1847, in Great Britain by railway companies using GMT kept by portable chronometers. The first of these companies to adopt standard time was the Great Western Railway in November 1840; this became known as Railway Time. About August 23, 1852, time signals were first transmitted by telegraph from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Though 98% of Great Britain's public clocks were using GMT by 1855, it was not made Britain's legal time until August 2, 1880; some British clocks from this period have two minute hands—one for the local time, one for GMT. Improvements in worldwide communication further increased the need for interacting parties to communicate mutually comprehensible time references to one another; the problem of differing local times could be solved across larger areas by synchronizing clocks worldwide, but in many places that adopted time would differ markedly from the solar time to which people were accustomed. On November 2, 1868, the British colony of New Zealand adopted a standard time to be observed throughout the colony, was the first country to do so.
It was based on the longitude 172°30′ East of Greenwich, 11 hours 30 minutes ahead of GMT. This standard was known as New Zealand Mean Time. Timekeeping on the American railroads in the mid-19th century was somewhat confused; each railroad used its own standard time based on the local time of its headquarters or most important terminus, the railroad's train schedules were published using its own time. Some junctions served by several railroads had a clock for each railroad, each showing a different time. Charles F. Dowd proposed a system of one-hour standard time zones for American railroads about 1863, although he published nothing on the matter at that time and did not consult railroad officials until 1869. In 1870 he proposed four ideal time zones, the first centered on Washington, D. C. but by 1872 the first was centered with geographic borders. Dowd's system was never accepted by American railroads. Instead, U. S. and Canadian railroads implemented a version proposed by William F. Allen, the editor of the Traveler's Official Railway Guide.
The borders of its time zones ran through railroad stations in major cities. For example, the border between its Eastern and Central time zones ran through Detroit, Pittsburgh and Charleston, it was inaugurated on Sunday, November 18, 1883 called "The Day of Two Noons", when each railroad station clock was reset as standard-time noon was reached within each time zone. The zones were named Intercolonial, Central and Pacific. Within a year 85% of all cities with populations over 10,000, about 200 cities, were using standard time. A notable exception was Detroit which kept local time until 1900 tried Central Standard Time, local mean time, Eastern Standard Time before a May 1915 ordinance settled on EST and was ratified by popular vote in August 1916; the confusion of times came to an end when Standard zone time was formally adopted by the U. S. Congress in the Standard Time Act of March 19, 1918; the first known person to conceive of a worldwide system of time zones was the Italian mathematician
San Francisco
San Francisco the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural and financial center of Northern California. San Francisco is the 13th-most populous city in the United States, the fourth-most populous in California, with 884,363 residents as of 2017, it covers an area of about 46.89 square miles at the north end of the San Francisco Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area, making it the second-most densely populated large US city, the fifth-most densely populated U. S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. San Francisco is part of the fifth-most populous primary statistical area in the United States, the San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area; as of 2017, it was the seventh-highest income county in the United States, with a per capita personal income of $119,868. As of 2015, San Francisco proper had a GDP of $154.2 billion, a GDP per capita of $177,968. The San Francisco CSA was the country's third-largest urban economy as of 2017, with a GDP of $907 billion.
Of the 500+ primary statistical areas in the US, the San Francisco CSA had among the highest GDP per capita in 2017, at $93,938. San Francisco was ranked 14th in the world and third in the United States on the Global Financial Centres Index as of September 2018. San Francisco was founded on June 29, 1776, when colonists from Spain established Presidio of San Francisco at the Golden Gate and Mission San Francisco de Asís a few miles away, all named for St. Francis of Assisi; the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought rapid growth, making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time. San Francisco became a consolidated city-county in 1856. San Francisco's status as the West Coast's largest city peaked between 1870 and 1900, when around 25% of California's population resided in the city proper. After three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. In World War II, San Francisco was a major port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater.
It became the birthplace of the United Nations in 1945. After the war, the confluence of returning servicemen, significant immigration, liberalizing attitudes, along with the rise of the "hippie" counterculture, the Sexual Revolution, the Peace Movement growing from opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War, other factors led to the Summer of Love and the gay rights movement, cementing San Francisco as a center of liberal activism in the United States. Politically, the city votes along liberal Democratic Party lines. A popular tourist destination, San Francisco is known for its cool summers, steep rolling hills, eclectic mix of architecture, landmarks, including the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, the former Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, Fisherman's Wharf, its Chinatown district. San Francisco is the headquarters of five major banking institutions and various other companies such as Levi Strauss & Co. Gap Inc. Fitbit, Salesforce.com, Reddit, Inc. Dolby, Weebly, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Pinterest, Uber, Mozilla, Wikimedia Foundation and Weather Underground.
It is home to a number of educational and cultural institutions, such as the University of San Francisco, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco State University, the De Young Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the California Academy of Sciences. As of 2019, San Francisco is the highest rated American city on world liveability rankings; the earliest archaeological evidence of human habitation of the territory of the city of San Francisco dates to 3000 BC. The Yelamu group of the Ohlone people resided in a few small villages when an overland Spanish exploration party, led by Don Gaspar de Portolà, arrived on November 2, 1769, the first documented European visit to San Francisco Bay. Seven years on March 28, 1776, the Spanish established the Presidio of San Francisco, followed by a mission, Mission San Francisco de Asís, established by the Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza. Upon independence from Spain in 1821, the area became part of Mexico. Under Mexican rule, the mission system ended, its lands became privatized.
In 1835, Englishman William Richardson erected the first independent homestead, near a boat anchorage around what is today Portsmouth Square. Together with Alcalde Francisco de Haro, he laid out a street plan for the expanded settlement, the town, named Yerba Buena, began to attract American settlers. Commodore John D. Sloat claimed California for the United States on July 7, 1846, during the Mexican–American War, Captain John B. Montgomery arrived to claim Yerba Buena two days later. Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco on January 30 of the next year, Mexico ceded the territory to the United States at the end of the war. Despite its attractive location as a port and naval base, San Francisco was still a small settlement with inhospitable geography; the California Gold Rush brought a flood of treasure seekers. With their sourdough bread in tow, prospectors accumulated in San Francisco over rival Benicia, raising the population from 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 by December 1849; the promise of great wealth was so strong that crews on arriving vessels deserted and rushed off to the gold fields, leaving behind a forest of masts in San Francisco harbor.
Some of these 500 abandoned ships were used at times as storeships and hotels.
San Mateo County, California
San Mateo County the County of San Mateo, is a county located in the U. S. state of California. As of the 2010 census, the population was 718,451; the county seat is Redwood City. San Mateo County is included in the San Calif.. Metropolitan Statistical Area, is part of the San Francisco Bay Area, the nine counties bordering San Francisco Bay, it covers most of the San Francisco Peninsula. San Francisco International Airport is located at the northern end of the county, Silicon Valley begins at the southern end; the county's built-up areas are suburban with some areas being urban, are home to several corporate campuses. San Mateo County was formed in 1856 after San Francisco County, one of the state's 18 original counties since California's statehood in 1850, was split apart; until 1856, San Francisco's city limits extended west to Divisadero Street and Castro Street, south to 20th Street. In response to the lawlessness and vigilantism that escalated between 1855 and 1856, the California government decided to divide the county.
A straight line was drawn across the tip of the San Francisco Peninsula just north of San Bruno Mountain. Everything south of the line became the new San Mateo County while everything north of the line became the new consolidated City and County of San Francisco, to date the only consolidated city-county in California; the consolidated city-county of San Francisco was formed by a bill introduced by Horace Hawes, signed by the governor on 19 April 1856. San Mateo County was organized on 18 April 1857 under a bill introduced by Senator T. G. Phelps; the 1857 bill defined the southern boundary of San Mateo County as following the south branch of San Francisquito Creek to its source in the Santa Cruz Mountains and thence due west to the Pacific Ocean, named Redwood City as the county seat. San Mateo County annexed part of northern Santa Cruz County in March 1868, including Pescadero and Pigeon Point. Although the forming bill named Redwood City the county seat, a May 1856 election marked by "unblushing frauds... perpetuated on an unorganized and wholly unprotected community by thugs and ballot stuffers from San Francisco" named Belmont the county seat.
The election results were declared illegal and the county government was moved to Redwood City, with land being donated from the original Pulgas Grant for the county government on 27 February 1858. Redwood City's status as county seat was upheld in two succeeding elections in May 1861 and 9 December 1873, defeating San Mateo and Belmont. Another election in May 1874 named San Mateo the county seat, but the state supreme court overturned that election on 24 February 1875 and the county seat has been in Redwood City since. San Mateo County bears the Spanish name for Saint Matthew; as a place name, San Mateo appears as early as 1776 in the diaries of Font. Several local geographic features were designated San Mateo on early maps including variously: a settlement, an arroyo, a headland jutting into the Pacific, a large land holding; until about 1850, the name appeared as San Matheo. The Japanese first arrived in San Mateo county and were part of a group guided by Ambassador Tomomi Iwakura back in 1872.
There were a number of all male Japanese students who came to San Mateo to learn English and many other helpful skills to bring back to Japan. These students were some of the first Japanese to join American students in the Belmont school for boys; these students had to work for their housing and food in the evenings. Many of the first Japanese immigrants were able to find jobs as gardeners and landscapers In San Mateo. Most of them had good educational background from their homelands, but their lack of knowing the English language made it difficult for them to find other jobs in the beginning. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 741 square miles, of which 448 square miles is land and 293 square miles is water, it is the third-smallest county in California by land area. A number of bayside watercourses drain the eastern part of the county including San Bruno Creek and Colma Creek. Streams draining the western county include Frenchmans Creek, Pilarcitos Creek, Naples Creek, Arroyo de en Medio, Denniston Creek.
These streams originate along the northern spur of the Santa Cruz Mountains that run through the county. The northern and north-east parts of the county are heavy densely populated with urban and suburban areas, with many of its cities as edge-cities for the Bay Area, whilst the deep south and the west central parts of the county are less heavy densely populated with more rural environment and coastal beaches areas. San Mateo County straddles the San Francisco Peninsula, with the Santa Cruz Mountains running its entire length; the county encompasses a variety of habitats including estuarine, oak woodland, redwood forest, coastal scrub and oak savannah. There are numerous species of wildlife present along the San Francisco Bay estuarine shoreline, San Bruno Mountain, Fitzgerald Marine Reserve and the forests on the Montara Mountain block. Several creeks discharge to the San Francisco Bay including San Mateo Creek and Laurel Creek and several coastal streams discharge to the Pacific Ocean such as Frenchmans Creek and San Vicente Creek.
Año Nuevo State Marine Conservation Area and Greyhound Rock State Marine Conservation Area are two adjoining marine protected areas off the coast of San Mateo County. Like underwater parks, these marine protected areas help conserve ocean wildlife and marine ecosystems; the county is home to several endangered species including the San Francisco garter snake and the San Bruno elfin butterfly, b
California
California is a state in the Pacific Region of the United States. With 39.6 million residents, California is the most populous U. S. the third-largest by area. The state capital is Sacramento; the Greater Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nation's second and fifth most populous urban regions, with 18.7 million and 9.7 million residents respectively. Los Angeles is California's most populous city, the country's second most populous, after New York City. California has the nation's most populous county, Los Angeles County, its largest county by area, San Bernardino County; the City and County of San Francisco is both the country's second-most densely populated major city after New York City and the fifth-most densely populated county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. California's $3.0 trillion economy is larger than that of any other state, larger than those of Texas and Florida combined, the largest sub-national economy in the world. If it were a country, California would be the 5th largest economy in the world, the 36th most populous as of 2017.
The Greater Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nation's second- and third-largest urban economies, after the New York metropolitan area. The San Francisco Bay Area PSA had the nation's highest GDP per capita in 2017 among large PSAs, is home to three of the world's ten largest companies by market capitalization and four of the world's ten richest people. California is considered a global trendsetter in popular culture, innovation and politics, it is considered the origin of the American film industry, the hippie counterculture, fast food, the Internet, the personal computer, among others. The San Francisco Bay Area and the Greater Los Angeles Area are seen as global centers of the technology and entertainment industries, respectively. California has a diverse economy: 58% of the state's economy is centered on finance, real estate services and professional, scientific and technical business services. Although it accounts for only 1.5% of the state's economy, California's agriculture industry has the highest output of any U.
S. state. California is bordered by Oregon to the north and Arizona to the east, the Mexican state of Baja California to the south; the state's diverse geography ranges from the Pacific Coast in the west to the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the east, from the redwood–Douglas fir forests in the northwest to the Mojave Desert in the southeast. The Central Valley, a major agricultural area, dominates the state's center. Although California is well-known for its warm Mediterranean climate, the large size of the state results in climates that vary from moist temperate rainforest in the north to arid desert in the interior, as well as snowy alpine in the mountains. Over time and wildfires have become more pervasive features. What is now California was first settled by various Native Californian tribes before being explored by a number of European expeditions during the 16th and 17th centuries; the Spanish Empire claimed it as part of Alta California in their New Spain colony. The area became a part of Mexico in 1821 following its successful war for independence but was ceded to the United States in 1848 after the Mexican–American War.
The western portion of Alta California was organized and admitted as the 31st state on September 9, 1850. The California Gold Rush starting in 1848 led to dramatic social and demographic changes, with large-scale emigration from the east and abroad with an accompanying economic boom; the word California referred to the Baja California Peninsula of Mexico. The name derived from the mythical island California in the fictional story of Queen Calafia, as recorded in a 1510 work The Adventures of Esplandián by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo; this work was the fifth in a popular Spanish chivalric romance series that began with Amadis de Gaula. Queen Calafia's kingdom was said to be a remote land rich in gold and pearls, inhabited by beautiful black women who wore gold armor and lived like Amazons, as well as griffins and other strange beasts. In the fictional paradise, the ruler Queen Calafia fought alongside Muslims and her name may have been chosen to echo the title of a Muslim leader, the Caliph. It's possible.
Know ye that at the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California close to that part of the Terrestrial Paradise, inhabited by black women without a single man among them, they lived in the manner of Amazons. They were robust of body with great virtue; the island itself is one of the wildest in the world on account of the craggy rocks. Shortened forms of the state's name include CA, Cal. Calif. and US-CA. Settled by successive waves of arrivals during the last 10,000 years, California was one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse areas in pre-Columbian North America. Various estimates of the native population range from 100,000 to 300,000; the Indigenous peoples of California included more than 70 distinct groups of Native Americans, ranging from large, settled populations living on the coast to groups in the interior. California groups were diverse in their political organization with bands, villages, on the resource-rich coasts, large chiefdoms, such as the Chumash and Salinan.
Trade, intermarriage a
United States
California
![[1]](http://www.hauntedbay.com/images/features/MBDsign500x490.jpg){kind=link}