Salinas, California

Salinas is a city in California and the county seat of Monterey County, in the United States. Its name is Spanish for salt flats. The 2020 census counted 163,542 people, which makes it the most populous city in Monterey County. The city lies at the mouth of the Salinas Valley, about eight miles from the Pacific Ocean, along the eastern edge of the Monterey Bay Area and just south of the San Francisco Bay Area, so its climate is shaped more by the ocean than by the interior. Salinas is the main business, governmental and industrial center of its region and is known as the Salad Bowl of the World for its vegetable, floral and vineyard agriculture. It was the hometown of the writer and Nobel laureate John Steinbeck, who set many of his stories in the Salinas Valley and Monterey.