Silicon Valley, a region known for high tech (semiconductors, computers, and biotech among them), mostly abides within Santa Clara County.  (It also extends a bit into San Mateo County, Santa Cruz County, and Alameda County.)  This is at the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area.  The weather is mild – it’s a subtropical climate and the palm and redwood trees will back that up. At one time, during the orchard heyday, it came to be known as The Valley of the Heart’s Delight.  Eventually the fruit and nut trees gave way to housing in the post World War II boom, and as high tech slowly took over as the regional industry, the moniker changed to Silicon Valley.

The people who live here love many things about the San Jose area and the Santa Clara Valley. The climate, of course, cannot be beat. The level of education is high, the population delightfully diverse, and crime is low.  Add to that a close proximity to San Francisco (an hour north by car or train), Berkeley and Oakland (ditto the time up the East Bay by car or BART), the beach at Santa Cruz (about a half hour), Monterey/Carmel (90 minutes), etc. You can drive to Napa or Sonoma for wine tasting – or you could do it within a couple of miles of the airport at the J Lohr Wine Tasting Room just off The Alameda. Of course, our hills have plenty of wineries too, and they are found closer in (Los Gatos and Cupertino and the east foothills of San Jose in the Evergreen area). In other words, there are a lot of reasons why “The Valley of Heart’s Delight” still applies.
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