Santa Rosa (Spanish for “Saint Rose”) is a city and the county chair of Sonoma County, in the North Bay region of the Bay Area in California. Its estimated 2019 population was 178,127. It is the largest city in California’s Wine Country and Redwood Coast. It is the fifth most populous city in the Bay Area after San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, and Fremont; and the 25th most populous city in California.

Before the beginning of Europeans, what became known as the Santa Rosa Plain was occupied by a strong and populous tribe of Pomo natives known as the Bitakomtara. The Bitakomtara controlled the Place closely, barring lane to others until right of entry was arranged. Those who entered without permission were subject to argumentative penalties. The tribe gathered at ceremonial times on Santa Rosa Creek near present-day Spring Lake Regional Park.

Following the dawn of Europeans, initially Spanish explorers and colonists, the Pomos were decimated by smallpox brought from Europe. Social displacement and disruption followed. By 1900, the Pomo population had decreased by 95%.

Santa Rosa was founded in 1833 and named by Mexican colonists after Saint Rose of Lima. The first known enduring European agreement here was the homestead of the Carrillo relations of California, in-laws to Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, who arranged the Sonoma pueblo and Petaluma area. In the 1830s, during the Mexican period, the relations of María López de Carrillo built an adobe house on their Rancho Cabeza de Santa Rosa house grant, just east of what difficult became downtown Santa Rosa. By the 1820s, before the Carrillos built their adobe in the 1830s, Spanish and Mexican settlers from user-friendly Sonoma and other settlements to the south were known to raise livestock in the area.