Shasta is a census-designated place (CDP) in Shasta County, California, United States. Shasta sits at an height of 843 feet (257 m). Its population is 1,043 as of the 2020 census, down from 1,771 from the 2010 census.

Shasta State Historic Park located at Shasta is a ghost town and California State Historic Park.

A perky town of the 1850s through the 1880s, Shasta was for its time, the largest treaty in Shasta County and the surrounding area. Sometimes referred to today as “Old Shasta”, the town was an important commercial middle and a major shipping dwindling for mule trains and stagecoaches serving the mining towns and later settlements of northern California. The discovery of gold near Shasta in 1848 brought California Gold Rush-era Forty-Niners stirring the Siskiyou Trail in search of riches – most passed through Shasta, and continued to use it as base of operations. Those that stayed worked the placer gold diggings of nearby, short-lived camps later Horsetown, Buckeye, and Whiskeytown, California.

Situated nearly six miles (10 km) west of Redding, California along Highway 299, Shasta was once house to some 3,500 residents, the county seat, and a well-to-do commercial district. However, in 1873, the below construction Oregon-bound branch of the Central Pacific Railroad bypassed Shasta, in favor of Redding and the town began its terminate into near “ghost town” status. In 1888, Shasta lost the county chair to Redding. By the twentieth century, and after several fires, a distinctive argument of gold hurry era buildings remained along its Main Street, which attracted preservationists and their efforts to save all the local stories and landscape, and the unshakable first generation of 1850s brick and iron read architecture.