El Cerrito (Spanish for “The Little Hill”) is a city in Contra Costa County, California, United States, and forms ration of the San Francisco Bay Area. It has a population of 25,962 according to the 2020 census. El Cerrito was founded by refugees from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It was incorporated in 1917 as a village when 1,500 residents. As of the census in 2000, there were 23,171 people, 10,208 households and 5,971 families in the city.

El Cerrito was founded by refugees from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. They arranged in what was then Don Víctor Castro’s Rancho San Pablo, and adjoining the ranch owned by the relatives of Luís María Peralta, the Rancho San Antonio. A pronounce office opened at the settlement in 1909 and the refugee camp became known as Rust, after Wilhelm F. Rust, its first postmaster. The village’s residents did not care for the declare and tainted it to El Cerrito (meaning “little hill” or “knoll”) in 1916, in hint to the many individual hills in the village. A year later, El Cerrito was incorporated as a village behind 1,500 residents.

El Cerrito was incorporated in August 1917. The communities of Stege Junction, Rust, Schmidtville, and Schindler, were anything included in the extra city. The 1920 census shows that the Schmidtville community had many Italian immigrants. A herald office operated at Schmidtville from 1900 to 1901.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total Place of 3.7 square miles (9.6 km), all of it land. The city ranges in elevation from 20 to 934 feet, with an average height of 69 feet (21 m).