California is one of the fifty states of the United States of America. Its capital is Sacramento, and its most populous city, Los Angeles. It is located in the western region of the country, Pacific Division, bounded on the north by Oregon, on the east by Nevada, on the southeast by the Colorado River that separates it from Arizona, on the south by Mexico and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. With 37 253 956 inhabitants in 2010 it is the most populous state and with 423 970 km², the third most extensive, behind Alaska and Texas. He was admitted to the Union on September 9,1850 as the 31st state.
In addition, it has the second and fifth most populous areas of the nation, Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area and eight of the cities most populated in the country: Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Fresno, Sacramento, Long Beach and Oakland. The zone was inhabited millenarian by Native Americans before the first European expeditions in the sixteenth century. These settlers were divided into 105 indigenous peoples who spoke the languages of six different linguistic families. The Spanish Crown colonized the coastal areas of the territory in 1769 before it became part of Mexico after the War of Independence of Mexico. California was part of Mexican territory until the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. At the end of the war and as a condition for peace, the Mexican Republic was forced to cede the territory to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Gold Rush in the period 1848-1849 caused an immigration of 90,000 Americans from the rest of the country.
Finally, California became the thirty-first State of the United States in 1850. If California were an independent nation, it would be the eighth largest economy in the world, with a GDP of around 2.4 trillion dollars, which represents 12.4% of the gross domestic product of the United States, amounting to a total of 19.3 billion dollars. The main economic activities of the State are agriculture, leisure, electric power and tourism. In California are located some of the most important economic cities in the world, such as Los Angeles, the Central Valley, Silicon Valley and the Napa Valley.