California county map

The 58 counties

California’s first legislature created 27 counties in February 1850, seven months before statehood. Most of the north-coast, Sierra foothill and Bay Area counties date from that year or the decade after, when gold-rush population shifts forced repeated subdivisions. The Central Valley and Southern California counties followed as irrigation and railways opened them up: Orange split from Los Angeles in 1889, Riverside from San Bernardino and San Diego in 1893, and Imperial from San Diego in 1907. No county has been created since.

Twenty-one county names are Spanish, mostly saints and mission names (San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Luis Obispo) or descriptive words (Contra Costa, Fresno, Merced, Nevada). Another dozen are Native American: Colusa, Inyo, Mono, Napa, Shasta, Siskiyou, Sonoma, Tehama, Tuolumne, Yolo, Yuba. Alpine, Del Norte, Glenn, Imperial, Kern, Lassen, Modoc, Orange and Plumas are among the later English, personal and descriptive names.

San Francisco is the state’s only consolidated city and county: since 1856 the city limits and county limits have been identical. Every other county elects a five-member board of supervisors. Los Angeles County, with 88 incorporated cities, has by far the most municipalities inside it.

All 58 counties of California

Five county facts

• Largest by area: San Bernardino County, about 20,100 square miles, the largest county in the contiguous United States. It runs from the Los Angeles suburbs across the Mojave Desert to the Nevada and Arizona lines.
• Smallest by area: San Francisco, about 47 square miles of land at the tip of its peninsula — the smallest county in the state and the only consolidated city–county.
• Most populous: Los Angeles County, 10,014,009 people in 2020, the most populous county in the nation. San Diego (3.3 million), Orange (3.2 million) and Riverside (2.4 million) follow; the four together hold nearly half of California.
• Least populous: Alpine County, high in the Sierra south of Lake Tahoe, with about 1,200 people and no incorporated city. Sierra County is next, then Modoc.
• Oldest and newest: the 27 original counties of 1850 include Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, Santa Clara and San Francisco. Imperial County, cut from San Diego County in 1907, is the newest. No county has been added or abolished since.

Reading the map

Press Streets and zoom in on the highlighted state to see county lines. The long, narrow counties of the Central Valley — Tehama, Glenn, Colusa, Yolo down to Kern — run east–west from the Coast Ranges to the Sierra crest, so each has valley floor, foothills and mountains. The small counties of the Mother Lode (Amador, Calaveras, Tuolumne, Mariposa, Nevada, Sierra) are remnants of gold-rush districts. The five desert and mountain counties on the Nevada line — Modoc, Lassen, Mono, Inyo and San Bernardino — are enormous but sparsely settled. The whole state is on Pacific Time.

Related maps

• California map — cities, borders and geography.
• Blank California map and printable California map.
• Sacramento, the capital; city maps for Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco and Fresno.
• Neighbouring county maps: Oregon, Nevada, Arizona.
• Pacific states · the West · Pacific Time Zone.
• Geography: Sierra Nevada, Mojave Desert, national parks.
• All US county maps.