Berkeley ( BURK-lee) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emeryville to the south and the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington to the north. Its eastern affix with Contra Costa County generally follows the ridge of the Berkeley Hills. The 2020 census recorded a population of 124,321.

Berkeley is house to the oldest campus in the University of California, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is managed and operated by the university. It as well as has the Graduate Theological Union, one of the largest religious studies institutions in the world. Berkeley is considered one of the most socially forward-thinking cities in the United States.

The site of today’s City of Berkeley was the territory of the Chochenyo/Huchiun band of the Ohlone people afterward the first Europeans arrived. Evidence of their existence in the area include pits in stone formations, which they used to roughen acorns, and a shellmound, now mostly leveled and covered up, along the shoreline of San Francisco Bay at the mouth of Strawberry Creek. Human remains and skeletons from Native American burials have been unearthed in West Berkeley and upon campus contiguously Strawberry Creek. Other artifacts were discovered in the 1950s in the downtown area during remodeling of a billboard building, near the upper course of the creek.

The first people of European descent (most of whom were of contaminated race and born in America) arrived in imitation of the De Anza Expedition in 1776. The De Anza Expedition led to instigation of the Spanish Presidio of San Francisco at the gain entry to to San Francisco Bay (the Golden Gate). Luis Peralta was in the midst of the soldiers at the Presidio. For his facilities to the King of Spain, he was contracted a huge stretch of land on the east shore of San Francisco Bay (the contra costa, “opposite shore”) for a ranch, including that allocation that now comprises the City of Berkeley.