Sacramento Overview
Sacramento, California is located at the confluence of the Sacramento River and the American River in Northern California. The city was named after the Sacramento River which flows along its western border.
The City of Sacramento, the State Capital of California, had an estimated population in 2014 of 485,199. The city is slightly over 100 square miles in size. Sacramento is the oldest incorporated city in California.
The Sacramento Region has a Mediterranean climate i.e. wet winters and hot, dry summers. Summer evenings often cool down as a result of the “Delta breeze” which blows through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta from the ocean via the San Francisco Bay.
The wet season is approximately from October through April. More than half of Sacramento’s annual rain falls between December and February. During the months of December and January “tule” fog can be dense limiting visibility. Snow is extremely rare in Sacramento and usually melts on contact, but hail is possible during the winter if there are intense showers.
Sacramento is in the Sacramento Valley, the northern half of the state’s great Central Valley. Sacramento is located 90 miles northeast of San Francisco, and 100 miles southwest of Lake Tahoe.
The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University conducted a survey for TIME magazine in 2002 and named Sacramento “America’s Most Diverse City”.
The fertile soils of the Sacramento Valley allow for the cultivation of a diverse array of crops, and farming and ranching are a major economic driver in the region.
There are over 11,000 small family farms in the Sacramento Valley, and many of the farms have been farmed by the same family for multiple generations.