Palo Alto Attractions

Santa Clara County

Location and origin

The town of Palo Alto lies 29mi/47km south of San Francisco on the U.S. 101. The Spanish name means "tall tree" and can be traced back to a centuries-old redwood tree (the Spaniards named it "palo colorade"), under which the Spanish governor camped with his expedition when they were searching for San Francisco Bay. The trunk of the tree is still there, by the San Francisquito brook, at the junction of Palo Alto Avenue and Camino Real. A century later Governor Leland Stanford revived the name by calling his ranch (where Stanford University now stands) Palo Alto. This name was also used when the town was founded in 1892. A year later a railway station of the Southern Pacific Railroad was built here; by absorbing other districts the town then extended as far as the bay of San Francisco. The part which reached as far as the Santa Cruz Mountains, however, was intentionally not built on.

Hewlett-Packard

Thanks especially to the university, Palo Alto has become an important home of the American electronics industry, with numerous small firms having been set up by university graduates. The biggest company established here is Hewlett-Packard. Its premises cover such a large area that it is as big as a town, with 25 car-parks, a large swimming-pool and a municipal golf-course.