The name is Spanish for “tall stick”, after El Palo Alto, the coast redwood that still stands on the creek at the city’s northern edge.
The town began in the late 1880s as University Park, a dry townsite beside the new university, and incorporated as Palo Alto on April 16, 1894. It annexed the older town of Mayfield in 1925, which is why it has two downtowns, along University Avenue and California Avenue.
The city reaches from the marshes of San Francisco Bay to the ridge of the Santa Cruz Mountains, and it had 68,572 residents at the 2020 census.