San Jose - City of Costa Rica

San Jose or San José is the third-largest city in California, and the tenth-largest in the United States. It is the county seat of Santa Clara County. San Jose is located in Santa Clara Valley, at the southern end of the Bay Area, a region referred to as Silicon Valley. Once a small farming city, San Jose became a magnet for suburban newcomers in new housing developments between the 1960s and 1990s, and is now the largest city in Northern California.

Prior to western settlement, the area was inhabited by several groups of Ohlone Native Americans. The first lasting European presence began with a series of Franciscan missions established from 1769 by Father Junípero Serra. The town was the first civil settlement in Alta California.

As World War II started, the city's economy shifted from agriculture to industrial manufacturing with the contracting of the Food Machinery Corporation by the United States War Department to build 1000 Landing Vehicle Tracked.

San Jose, like most of the Bay Area, has a Mediterranean climate. Unlike San Francisco, which is exposed to the ocean or Bay on three sides and whose temperature therefore varies relatively little year-round and overnight, San Jose lies farther inland, protected on three sides by mountains. This shelters the city from rain and makes it more of a semiarid, near-desert area, compared to some other parts of the Bay Area, which can get up to four times that amount. It also avoids San Francisco's omnipresent fog most of the year.

Like most of the Bay Area, San Jose is made up of dozens of microclimates. Downtown San Jose experiences the lightest rainfall in the city, while South San Jose, only 10 miles distant, experiences more rainfall and slightly more extreme temperatures.

San Jose is home to several colleges and universities. The largest and most well known is San José State University, which was founded by the California Legislature in 1862 as the California State Normal School and is the original campus of the California State University system. Located in downtown San Jose since 1870, the university's 30,000 students in bachelor's and master's degree programs are primarily commuters from many areas in the South Bay.

The University of California, Santa Cruz operates Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton. In addition, San Jose residents attend several other area universities, including Santa Clara University, De Anza College in Cupertino, Stanford University in Palo Alto, Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley in Mountain View and the University of California, Berkeley. Additionally, San Jose and South Bay residents also comprise large sections of the student population at both the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of California, Davis.


Private schools in San Jose are primarily run by religious groups. The Catholic Diocese of San Jose has the second largest student population in the Santa Clara County, behind only SJUSD the diocese and its parishes operate several schools in the city, including four high schools Archbishop Mitty High School, Bellarmine College Preparatory, Notre Dame High School, and Presentation High School.

Do You Know the Way to San Jose, lyrics, Hal David – music, Burt Bacharach; Grammy-winning 1968 hit single for Dionne Warwick, Scepter Records 12216; more than 100 other recordings.
Disclosure, a book by Michael Crighton, and later a film starring Michael Douglas, Donald Sutherland and Demi Moore, was set in San Jose.
Michaela Roessner. Vanishing Point. Tor, New York, 1993. ISBN 0-3128-5213-4. Post-apocalyptic novel, largely set in San Jose; many South Bay survivors have gathered to live in the Winchester Mystery House and the nearby Century Theatres dome.