The name "Dahanu Gaon" originates from the word "Dhenu Gram" meaning the village of cows.

Today, Dahanu has become a major commercial and industrial town in the Palghar district.

Accessible from Dahanu is Udwada—a significant place of worship for the Zoroastrians—with a large, nifty temple that houses their sacred fire.

Under the administration of the Sultanate of Gujarat, the coastal settlement grew in importance and soon attracted many other communities such as the local Konkanis as well as the surrounding tribal and Gujarati people.

According to the Treaty of Mandsaur (1818), the Holkar state (which included the village of Dahanu) became subsidiary to the British.

Dahanu is well known for its famous chikoos, capsicum and coconuts and tadi drink, a juice of palm tree.

In year 2018, Reliance sold its power generation and transmission business to Adani Electricity.

Dahanu is a coastal region, the staple food of the people living there is rice and fish.

Dahanu and surrounding area is designated by the government of India as an ecologically fragile zone, to protect the greenery from industrial pollution.

Electrostatic precipitators (ESP) are installed to collect fly ash and minimize emissions to the atmosphere.

The Supreme Court Order of 1996 which upheld the Dahanu Notification and issued further directives to ensure implementation of the same.

The huge industrial area at Tarapur accommodates various specialty chemical, bulk drugs, steel and alloy and textile manufacturing companies.

Tour organisers arrange a single day picnic from Mumbai and they come in numbers every weekends.

In fact another new Jain Temple has been built (about 5 years ago) located at Irani Road opposite IDBI Bank.

To the west of the town is the coast of the Arabian Sea while the east is lined with the Sahyadri ranges.

[citation needed] Sprawling Chickoo wadis (farms), rose gardens, salt pans are among the other things that dot the landscape.

The Dahanu beach is an extensive 15 km stretch lined by coconut and Saru (casuarina equisetifolia) trees.

This is mostly crowded on the weekend when people from the metropolitan city of Mumbai come to visit as it is a short commute.

The other days life is very laid back and the beach does not see much tourist crowd except inhabitants of Dahanu.

Among them Shirin Dinyar Irani Learners Academy is well Known for Sport and innovative activities.

The National Highway NH8 runs through the taluka near Charoti, around 25 km east of the Dahanu town.

It is the northern limit (terminal station) of the Suburban local train network, although the track continues north to Gholvad and beyond.Regular local trains & Memu are available for Churchgate, Dadar, Borivali & Virar, & also Panvel.

There are also direct express trains from Dahanu which connects it with cities like Mumbai, Surat, Pune, Ahmedabad, Goa, Trivandrum, Bhuj, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Jamnagar, Delhi, Amritsar, Firozpur, Porbunder.

State-run Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT), India's busiest container gateway near Mumbai, is planning to build a satellite port at Vadhavan in Palghar district, Dahanu [6][7][8][9] in Maharashtra for at least Rs.10,000 crore.

[11] Adivasis(Warlis, Dubla,Dhodi), Mangela(Koli), Bhandari, Machhi and Bari community people dominate the population of the town with significant amount of Parsis and Iranis;Jains,Muslims and Gujaratis.

This makes Dahanu a rich town by itself compared to neighbouring taluka of Palghar.

While their narratives and consciousness come from a history of police brutality, exploitation by landlords, moneylenders and liquor contractors and from their continuous struggle for land rights and access to the forests, they are today forced into practicing settled subsistence agriculture.

They now live on the margins of industrial and urban areas on the fringes of their slowly eroding forest lands.

There are mostly Warli/Varli, Malhar Koli, Mangela, Machhi, Bari,Mahyavanshi, Vdaval, Kunabi, Kokani, Kathodi and other tribes lives in Dahanu.