Located in the southern Bay Area, the city was founded by the Spanish in 1777 with the establishment of Mission Santa Clara de Asís under the leadership of Junípero Serra.

Santa Clara is located in the center of Silicon Valley and is home to the headquarters of companies such as Intel, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Nvidia.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the 18th century, the Tamien tribe of the Ohlone nation of Indigenous Californians had inhabited the area for several millennia.

In 1905, the first public high-altitude flights by humans were made over Santa Clara in gliders designed by John J. Montgomery.

The semiconductor industry, which sprouted around 1960, changed the city and surrounding Valley of Heart's Delight; little of its agricultural past remains.

This structure, on Kiely Boulevard, was replaced in 2007 with a new Kaiser Permanente medical center located on Lawrence Expressway at Homestead Road.

Santa Clara was also home to a major mental health facility, Agnews State Hospital.

[13] This owl uses burrows created by ground squirrels and prefers generally level grasslands and even disturbed areas.

Santa Clara owns and operates an electric utility called Silicon Valley Power.

The new combined cycle gas turbine plant produces 147 megawatts of electricity for the city and its residents.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Affymetrix, Agilent Technologies, Applied Materials, Arista Networks, Aruba, Auditoria.AI, Brillio, Chegg, Cloudera, Coherent, FileMaker, Hortonworks, Infoblox, Intel, Intevac, Marvell, McAfee, Move inc, National Semiconductor, Nvidia, OmniVision, Ooyala, Palo Alto Networks, Rovi, ServiceNow, SVB Financial Group, Trident Microsystems and Veritas Technologies are among the companies headquartered in Santa Clara.

Santa Clara is also home to California's Great America, an amusement park currently operated by Cedar Fair, L.P.

Nearby is the Santa Clara Convention Center, one of Silicon Valley's largest event and meeting venues.

The red and white of the Santa Clara Broncos is featured on the flag of the city, as is the Mission which lies at the heart of the campus.

The organization runs and operates a winter guard, an indoor percussion ensemble, and two drum and bugle corps, all of which compete across the country every year.

On Wednesday, November 8, 2006, the 49ers announced their intention to move the team to Santa Clara in time for the fall 2014 season, after negotiations failed with the city of San Francisco to build a new stadium.

[30] Santa Clara will host multiple matches during the 2026 FIFA World Cup at Levi's Stadium.