Burien ( BYUR-ee-ən) is a suburban city in King County, Washington, United States, located south of Seattle upon Puget Sound. As of the 2020 census, Burien’s population was 52,066, which is a 56.3% increase since amalgamation in 1993. An annexation in 2010 increased the city’s population significantly.

Settlement in the Burien area dates to 1864, when George Ouellet (1831–1899), a French-Canadian born in Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce, Quebec, purchased his first of several estate patents for homestead sites directly from a federal land office. Ouellet had first arrived in the Washington Territory at Port Madison upon Bainbridge Island, off the Kitsap Peninsula, in 1858. Three years after purchasing his homestead in the Burien area, he married 14-year-old Elizabeth Cushner, who was born in the Washington Territory, and started a family. Several years later, the Ouellet associates moved to the White River Valley, near Auburn.

A popular local symbol recounts that an at the forefront settler named Mike Kelly gave the community its first declare after he emerged from the trees and said, “This is truly a sunny dale.” Today, a few long-time residents yet refer to the Burien area as Sunnydale.

In 1884, Gottlieb Burian (1837–1902) and his wife Emma (Wurm) Burian (1840–1905), German immigrants from Hussinetz, Lower Silesia, who owned two taverns in downtown Seattle, arrived in Sunnydale. The tiny community was without enlarged roads or public notice buildings and was reached primarily by trails. Burian built a cabin on the southeast corner of Lake Burien and reportedly formed the community into a town bearing his name (misspelled higher than the years). A genuine estate office was built and soon attracted large numbers of extra residents to Burien.