Tampa is a city upon the Gulf Coast of the U.S. state of Florida. The city’s borders tally the north shore of Tampa Bay and the east shore of Old Tampa Bay. Tampa is the largest city in the Tampa Bay Place and the seat of Hillsborough County. With a population of 384,959 according to the 2020 census, Tampa is the third-most populated city in Florida after Jacksonville and Miami and is the 52nd most populated city in the United States.

Tampa functioned as a military middle during the 19th century considering the introduction of Fort Brooke. The cigar industry was afterward brought to the city by Vincente Martinez Ybor, after whom Ybor City is named. Tampa was formally reincorporated as a city in 1887, following the Civil War. Today, Tampa’s economy is driven by tourism, health care, finance, insurance, technology, construction, and the maritime industry. The bay’s port is the largest in the state, responsible for over $15 billion in economic impact.

The city is part of the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area which is a four-county Place composed of on the order of 3.1 million residents, making it the second-largest metropolitan statistical area (MSA) in the disclose and the fourth largest in the Southeastern United States, behind Washington D.C., Miami, and Atlanta. The Greater Tampa Bay Place has greater than 4 million residents and generally includes the Tampa and Sarasota metro areas. As of 2018, Tampa’s annual increase rate is 1.63%.

When the investor community living near the US Army outpost of Fort Brooke was incorporated in 1849, it was called “Tampa Town” and the proclaim was shortened to simply “Tampa” in 1855. The out of date instance of the name “Tampa”, in the form “Tanpa”, appears in the memoirs of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, who spent 17 years as a captive of the Calusa and traveled through much of peninsular Florida. He described Tanpa as an important Calusa town to the north of the Calusa domain, possibly under another chief. Archaeologist Jerald Milanich places the town of Tanpa at the mouth of Charlotte Harbor. The entrances to Tampa Bay and Charlotte Harbor are obscured by barrier islands, and their locations, and the names applied to them, were a source of confusion to explorers, surveyors and map-makers from the 16th century through the 18th century. Bahía Tampa and Bahía de Espíritu Santo were each used, at one era or another, for the advocate Tampa Bay and Charlotte Harbor. Tampa Bay was labeled Bahía de Espíritu Santo (Bay of the Holy Spirit) in the early Spanish maps of Florida, but became known as B. Tampa (Bahía Tampa or Tampa Bay) as in front as 1576. “B. Tampa”, corresponding to Tampa Bay, appeared for the first time upon a printed map in Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas’s Description del Destricto del Audiencia de la Espanola, from his LP Descripcion de las Indias Ocidentales, printed in Madrid in 1601.