Biohazard Cleanup Near Sunset Salinas, CA

Salinas was named for a nearby salt marsh — 'salinas' means salt pans or salt marshes in Spanish — and it has existed as a town since 1856, when Deacon Elias Howe built the Half-Way House inn at the site.

Salinas became the seat of Monterey County in 1872, the year the Southern Pacific Railroad arrived, and it incorporated on March 4, 1874.

With 163,542 residents in the 2020 census, Salinas is the most populous city in Monterey County and its main business, government, and industrial center.

Salinas has about 43,600 households with roughly 3.65 people per household, one of the highest average household sizes among California cities.

Salinas is known worldwide as the 'Salad Bowl of the World' for its huge vegetable industry, and the Salinas Valley grows roughly 70% of the nation's lettuce.

Salinas was the hometown of Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck, who was born there in 1902 at 132 Central Avenue and set many of his stories in the Salinas Valley.

The National Steinbeck Center in downtown Salinas is a major museum dedicated to Steinbeck's life and work, and his boyhood home, the Steinbeck House, is preserved nearby.

Hartnell College, founded in 1920 as Salinas Junior College and renamed in 1948, is the city's community college, and Salinas also hosts a satellite campus of California State University, Monterey Bay.

Salinas began as a cattle-raising center, and the California Rodeo, held in Salinas since the early twentieth century, still pays homage to that western heritage.

The city's early growth rested on two Mexican ranchos — the 6,700-acre Rancho Nacional and the 10,000-acre Rancho Sausal — granted after Mexico won independence from Spain.