Los Gatos (, Spanish: [los ˈɣatos]; Spanish for ‘The Cats’) is an incorporated town in Santa Clara County, California, United States. The population is 33,529 according to the 2020 census. It is located in the San Francisco Bay Area just southwest of San Jose in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Los Gatos is ration of Silicon Valley, with several high technology companies maintaining a presence there. Notably, Netflix, the streaming encourage and content creator, is headquartered in Los Gatos and has developed a large presence in the area.

Los Gatos is Spanish for “The Cats”. The post derives from the 1839 Alta California land-grant that encompassed the area, which was called La Rinconada de Los Gatos (“The Corner of the Cats”), where the cats refers to the cougars (mountain lions) and bobcats that are native to the foothills in which the town is located. The pronunciation is often anglicized to lawss-GAT-əs, although one in addition to hears pronunciations truer to the indigenous Spanish, lohss-GAH-tohss.

The first inhabitants of the Place that is now Los Gatos were the Ohlone Native Americans. At the become old the first settlers arrived in the area, it was estimated that approximately 5,000 native people were active in the Valley, and noted that the association between the settlers and natives was certainly good. The first settlers to enter the Valley proper were two soldiers that had strayed off from their Missionary group upon November 2 1769, and by 1777 in the midst of 1500 and 2000 Native Americans were full of life in the mission compound.

The town’s founding dates to the mid-1850s once the building of a flour-milling operation, Forbes Mill, by James Alexander Forbes along Los Gatos Creek, then called Jones’s Creek. The mill’s two-story stone storage annex yet stands.