USA — California & West Coast

Why USA — California & West Coast works

California is a U.S. state on the Pacific Coast, bordered by Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and the Mexican state of Baja California to the south. With more than 39 million residents across 163,696 square miles, it is the most populous U.S. state and the third-largest by area, encompassing Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, the country's second- and fifth-largest combined metropolitan regions, alongside the state capital, Sacramento. Before European colonisation, the region that became California was one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse parts of pre-Columbian North America, a diversity that predates the waves of Spanish, Mexican, and American settlement that followed.

Spanish exploration of the California coast began in 1542 with an expedition led by the Portuguese captain Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, sailing for the Viceroy of New Spain, which entered San Diego Bay that September and continued north along the coastline. Sustained colonisation followed the Portolá expedition of 1769–70, when Gaspar de Portolá led an overland party and Junípero Serra a seaborne one to found Mission San Diego de Alcalá, the first of 21 Spanish missions eventually built along the coastal route known as El Camino Real; San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Ventura all grew out of these mission settlements. California passed to Mexican rule after Mexico's war of independence in 1821, and following the Mexican-American War it was ceded to the United States in 1848, the same year the California Gold Rush began, reshaping the territory's population fast enough that it was admitted to the Union as the 31st state in 1850.

California's geography splits sharply between coast and interior: the Sierra Nevada in the east holds Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet the highest peak in the contiguous United States, along with Yosemite Valley and its glacially carved granite domes, Sequoia National Park's giant sequoias, the largest living organisms on Earth, and Lake Tahoe, the state's largest lake by volume. The Central Valley, framed by the Sierra Nevada to the east and the Coast Ranges to the west, forms the state's agricultural heartland, watered by the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, while the arid southeast holds Death Valley, whose Badwater Basin, at 279 feet below sea level, is the lowest point in North America, less than 90 miles from Mount Whitney's summit as the crow flies. California's coastline itself runs from redwood and Douglas fir forest in the northwest through the beaches and metropolitan sprawl of Los Angeles and San Diego to the Mojave Desert further inland.

A largely Mediterranean climate defines the coast, moderated by the cool California Current so that summer temperatures in Los Angeles and San Francisco stay markedly cooler than points just a few miles inland, while the Central Valley sees sharper temperature extremes and the high Sierra Nevada carries an alpine climate with winter snow. Rainfall is heavier in the north than the south, and the state's mountain ranges cast pronounced rain shadows to their east, producing the deserts of the Mojave and, ultimately, Death Valley, which holds the record for the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth, 134 degrees Fahrenheit, measured there on July 10, 1913.

California's cultural export runs well beyond its scenery: Hollywood and the greater Los Angeles area host the major American film studios and remain a global centre of the entertainment industry, while the San Francisco Bay Area's Silicon Valley anchors the modern technology industry, home to several of the world's best-known internet and computing companies. The state has also been marketed for over a century as an idealized resort destination, sunny and dry with easy reach of both ocean and mountains, an image that early 20th-century boosters promoted and that later found its way into surf and car culture and the popular music that grew out of the state, from the Bakersfield sound to Bay Area thrash metal and West Coast hip hop.

• California — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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