Santa Clara County is located at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area in California. As of 2008 population was estimated at 1,764,499. The county seat is the city of San Jose. The highly urbanized Santa Clara Valley within Santa Clara is also known as Silicon Valley. It is the most populous county in the Bay Area region.

Santa Clara County was one of the original counties of California, formed in 1850 at the time of statehood. The original inhabitants included the Ohlone, residing on Coyote Creek and Calaveras Creek. Part of the county's territory was given to Alameda County in 1853.
The county is named after Mission Santa Clara, which was established in 1777, and named for Saint Clare of Assisi, Italy.

The term "Silicon Valley" was itself coined in 1971. The trend accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s, and agriculture has been nearly eliminated from the northern part of the county. Today, Santa Clara County is the headquarters for such companies as Apple, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Intel and many others. The county is the main area of the Silicon Valley, which includes several other counties both north and south of Santa Clara.

Parks and Recreation: www.parkhere.org/
County Website: www.sccgov.org
School District: http://www.sccoe.k12.ca.us/