San Jose

Though culturally diverse and historical, San Jose – awash in Silicon Valley’s suburbia – has always been in San Francisco’s shadow. Founded in 1777 as El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, San Jose is California’s oldest Spanish civilian settlement. Its downtown is small and scarcely used for a city of its size, though it does bustle with twenty-something clubgoers on weekends. Industrial parks, high-tech computer firms and look-alike housing developments are sprawled across the city’s landscape, taking over from where farms, ranches and open spaces once spread between the bay and the surrounding hills.