Find things to do, places to visit, and experiences to explore at Visit California, the Golden State’s official tourism site. Learn about national parks, hotels, restaurants, beaches, mountains, cities, and more.

Book these experiences for a close-up look at California. These rankings are informed by Tripadvisor data—we consider traveler reviews, ratings, number of page views, and user location. 1. Alcatraz Island was once the most secure federal prison in the U.S., and held notorious inmates like Al Capone.

California’s population, concentrated mostly along the coast, is the most urban in the United States, with more than three-fourths of the state’s people living in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego metropolitan areas.

More than 10,000 years ago, the first people arrived in what is now California. They walked from Asia, crossing on a strip of land that’s now submerged under a body of water between Russia and the United States called the Bering Strait.

California (/ ˌkælɪˈfɔːrniə /) is a state in the Western United States that lies on the Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, and Nevada and Arizona to the east; it also shares an international border with the Mexican state of Baja California to the south.

Description: This map shows states boundaries, the state capital, counties, county seats, cities and towns, islands, lakes, and national parks in California.

California, constituent state of the United States of America. It was admitted as the 31st state of the union on , and by the early 1960s it was the most populous U.S. state.