Explore the South Bay
Travel the South Bay Like a Local
South Bay Travel Tips Curated by Local Experts
- San Jose used to be the state capital, and is the 3rd most populous city in California.
- Silicon Valley is home to many of the world’s largest tech companies and where the microprocessor was developed.
The handheld calculator. The integrated circuit. The microprocessor. The personal computer, iPod, iPad, and iPhone. All of these and many more were created in the South Bay.
Let’s drive south about 50 miles on Highway 101 to explore what it has to offer.
Burlingame: Charming town with lots to see. A Shorebird Sanctuary is home to a dozen species of migratory birds. The Peninsula Museum of Art features talent from the Greater Bay Area. Mingalaba Restaurant for Burmese food and Curry Hyuga for Japanese delicacies are popular downtown. And The IT’s-IT Factory is still making incredibly delicious ice cream sandwiches since 1928.
Silicon Valley: Originally a nickname for Santa Clara County, this global center for more than 2,000 innovative tech companies is home to Adobe, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Google, HP and Netflix. If you own electronic devices, chances are, part or all of them were created here by the area’s brilliant scientists, inventors, and coders. The area even spurned a popular HBO series by the same name.
Palo Alto: The “Birthplace of Silicon Valley” offers 36 parks, over 40 miles of walking and biking trails, and great shops along University Avenue, including an Apple Store. The HP Garage is a private museum where Hewlett-Packard was founded in 1939.
Stanford: Stanford University is an elite institution with Stanford Health Care and Stanford Children’s Health on its campus. Stanford Shopping Center is an open air mall with over premier 150 stores such as Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus, and Nordstrom, plus nearly 30 restaurants.
Santa Clara: The esteemed Santa Clara University, California’s Great America amusement park, and Levi’s Stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers, are the big draws here, as well as the Intel Museum, where silicon chips were first manufactured.
San Jose: Northern California’s largest city is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley, and home to over 50,000 millionaires. The Tech Museum of Innovation and IMAX Dome Theater are family-friendly. The SAP Center hosts Sharks games and concerts; the Winchester Mystery House is creepily interesting; the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles may surprise you; and Lick Observatory at Mount Hamilton is still seeing stars since 1888.
Eating in San Jose is all about ethnic diversity in the historic downtown district: Café Eden offers shawarma, falafels, and manakeesh; Da Kine Island Grill takes your taste buds to Hawaii; the Blackbird Tavern is a great California bistro; while Tasty Tacos, Zona Rosa, Adelita’s Taqueria & Bar, Chavelas Restaurant, and El Camaron De Sinaloa provide great Mexican fare.
The South Bay’s storied history follows many familiar beats of California history, with influence over the centuries from indigenous tribes, Spanish missionaries, Gold Rush settlers and modern-day industry.
Early South Bay History
The first humans on the land were of the Ohlone people, a network of tribes who lived across the Bay Area and down the coast. Tribes like the Ramaytush and Tamien Nation lived in the South Bay for thousands of years, subsisting off the region’s rivers, woodlands and bay ecosystem.
Spanish soldiers and missionaries upended this way of life with their arrival in the late 18th century. Many South Bay city names are vestiges of this era: present-day Santa Clara was the site of Mission Santa Clara de Asís and present-day San José was founded as el Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe. (The official “Mission de San José” is, counterintuitively, located in the East Bay town of Fremont.)
The ensuing years saw the South Bay swap countries a few times: From Spain to Mexico to the California Republic, until eventual U.S. annexation in 1848 — just in time for the Gold Rush. The South Bay became “the Valley of Heart’s Delight,” a center for agriculture that helped feed the growing Bay Area. Meanwhile, the opening of Stanford University in 1891 laid the intellectual foundation for what would later become Silicon Valley.
World War II and the Birth of Silicon Valley
During the early 20th century, even more cities were incorporated in the South Bay and up the Peninsula. Radio was the first tech love for the region, with leading developments for communication and entertainment, including the nation’s first radio station with regularly scheduled programming in San José.
Wartime plunged industries into military and aeronautical research. Hewlett-Packard (est. 1939 in Palo Alto) was one such company. After the war, Stanford University encouraged partnerships between academia and industry, leading to the development of Stanford Industrial Park in the 1950s, now called Stanford Research Park.
In 1956, Silicon Valley got its name thanks to inventor William Shockley, who co-invented the transistor and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View. Where other engineers used the element germanium to make semiconductors, Shockley favored silicon.
The South Bay, Then and Now
The rising semiconductor industry pioneered the modern microchip and began a lineage of leading companies in the region, like Intel, AMD and later Apple, Google and Facebook. Today, information technology and software have become the hallmark of modern Silicon Valley, where giant tech campuses dot the landscape like boom towns of yore.
Even as a site of cutting-edge research and futuristic invention, the South Bay’s rich history is still present.
