24/7 Biohazard and Crime Scene Cleanup in Holtville, CA

Holtville is a small farming city in Imperial County, about 10.5 miles east of El Centro, lying on the northeast bank of the Alamo River.

Holtville proudly calls itself the 'Carrot Capital of the World' — its official city motto — and celebrates the crop with the annual Holtville Carrot Festival.

The community was founded in 1903 by W. F. Holt and first named Holton, but the U.S. Postal Service asked for a new name because Holton sounded too much like Colton in San Bernardino County, so it became Holtville in his honor.

Holtville was incorporated in 1908, making it one of the oldest cities in the Imperial Valley; Swiss-German settlers had begun farming the area as early as the 1880s, often arriving through Mexico.

Holtville's growth rode a series of water and transport milestones — 1890s railroads, U.S. Route 80 in the 1920s (later Interstate 8), and the All-American Canal in the late 1940s, which delivered Colorado River water to the valley's fields.

Holtville's population was 5,605 at the 2020 census, down from 5,939 in 2010.

Holtville has about 1,549 households averaging about 3.58 people each, large households typical of the farmworker communities of the Imperial Valley.

In 2006 Holtville made local history when voters elected Lisa Bianca Padilla, the first Hispanic woman ever to win a seat on the city council.

On Holtville's edge sits the Barbara Worth Resort and Country Club, whose golf course opened in 1927; it is named for Harold Bell Wright's bestselling 1911 novel 'The Winning of Barbara Worth,' written at Wright's Tecolote Rancho beside the site, dramatizing the reclamation of the Imperial Valley desert — and Wright inscribed the book to his friend W. F. Holt, Holtville's own founder.