What Is Cupertino Known For? And Is Cupertino in Silicon Valley?

Cupertino is best known as Apple’s hometown, but the city was a crossroads of orchards and vineyards long before it was a tech address. Here are the short answers to the two questions people ask most, then the details, each with its source.

The short answer

• Is Cupertino in Silicon Valley? Yes. It’s a city in Santa Clara County, and the city itself says it sits on Silicon Valley’s western edge, against the Santa Cruz Mountain foothills. Every common definition of Silicon Valley includes it; which cities are in Silicon Valley has the full list.
• What is it known for? Apple, first of all: Apple has been in Cupertino since 1977, and Apple Park has been its headquarters since 2017. Also De Anza College, the open space in the foothills (Rancho San Antonio, Fremont Older, Stevens Creek County Park), the wineries in the hills above town, and a spring Cherry Blossom Festival.
• Where is it? Sunnyvale and Los Altos are to the north, San Jose and Santa Clara to the east and Saratoga to the south. The city puts it about 42 miles south of San Francisco, and I-280 and State Route 85 run through it.
• What do homes cost? In the 12 months to October 27, 2026, the median house sold for $3.3M ($1,660 per sq ft), and 71% of houses sold over asking. Condos and townhomes: a median of $1.28M. Details in Moving to Cupertino.

Is Cupertino part of Silicon Valley?

Yes, though Silicon Valley isn’t an official place: no city, county or census area carries the name, so it depends on who draws the map. Every common definition starts with Santa Clara County, and Cupertino is one of its 15 cities. Joint Venture Silicon Valley’s annual Silicon Valley Index, the most-cited formal definition, includes every Santa Clara County city and names Cupertino. The City of Cupertino describes itself as sitting on Silicon Valley’s western edge, and its official history says that by the 1970s Cupertino and the other farm towns of the Valley of Heart’s Delight had become what we now call Silicon Valley. Apple describes Apple Park as being in the heart of the Santa Clara Valley.

Within the county, Cupertino is one of the West Valley cities, grouped with Campbell, Monte Sereno, Saratoga and Los Gatos by the county’s local agency formation commission. Its western side climbs into the Santa Cruz Mountain foothills.

What Cupertino is known for

Apple

Apple arrived in Cupertino in 1977, according to the city’s history. Its earlier headquarters campus at 1 Infinite Loop was completed in 1993 and is still in use for offices. Apple Park, the 175-acre campus whose main building is a ring of about 2.8 million square feet wrapped in curved glass, began receiving employees in April 2017; part of its site was once a large Hewlett-Packard campus. The part open to the public is the Apple Park Visitor Center at 10600 North Tantau Avenue, opened in November 2017, with an Apple Store, a café and a roof terrace that looks toward the ring. Apple’s press releases carry the dateline “Cupertino, California,” and “Cupertino” is often used as shorthand for the company. Prices near the campus: homes near Apple Park.

De Anza College

De Anza College opened on September 11, 1967, and is part of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District. Its 112-acre campus was once the Baldwins’ Beaulieu wine estate, and their 1892 house, Le Petit Trianon, is on the National Register of Historic Places and holds the college’s California History Center. The Fujitsu Planetarium runs public shows. The campus is also where Steve Jobs introduced the original Macintosh in January 1984, at the Flint Center, a theater that has since been torn down. See homes near De Anza College.

Open space at the edge of town

Rancho San Antonio pairs a 293-acre county park with a 2,180-acre Midpeninsula open space preserve, linked by more than 25 miles of trail, at Cupertino’s northwest edge. Fremont Older Preserve (739 acres) sits in the foothills between Cupertino and Saratoga, and its trails connect to Stevens Creek County Park, which has a boat launch on Stevens Creek Reservoir, behind a dam finished in 1935. In town, Memorial Park is the city’s largest park at 22 acres, Blackberry Farm has pools, picnic areas and a stretch of the Stevens Creek Trail, McClellan Ranch Preserve keeps the restored 1880s Baer Blacksmith Shop, and Deep Cliff is a public golf course. See homes near Rancho San Antonio and homes near Stevens Creek County Park.

Wine and orchards, before tech

Vineyards once covered Montebello Ridge, the lower foothills and the valley floor around Cupertino. When a vine pest wiped out about three-quarters of them in the late 1890s, many growers replanted with prunes, apricots, cherries, peaches, plums, walnuts and almonds, and the spring blossoms gave the valley its old nickname, the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Two wineries in the hills above Cupertino carry on: Ridge Vineyards’ Monte Bello, where vines were planted in 1885 and a limestone winery released its first vintage in 1892 (tastings by appointment), and Picchetti Winery, on a 308-acre Midpeninsula preserve, whose buildings date from 1880 to 1920 and are on the National Register.

The name

In 1776, Pedro Font, the diarist and mapmaker of Juan Bautista de Anza’s expedition, named a stream Arroyo San Jose de Cupertino, after Saint Joseph of Copertino; that stream is today’s Stevens Creek. A state historical landmark plaque, No. 800, marks the expedition’s campsite on McClellan Road. In the 1880s, John T. Doyle used the name for his Cupertino Wine Co., and in 1904 it went to the crossroads, post office and general store. The Italian town of Copertino became the city’s first sister city in 1963. Cupertino incorporated on October 10, 1955, the county’s 13th city.

The “Cupertino effect”

Editors use the term for a spell-checker mistake: older checkers that knew only “co-operation” flagged “cooperation” and suggested “Cupertino,” which ended up in official documents. As Oxford University Press and World Wide Words note, it has nothing to do with Apple; the city’s name was simply in the dictionary.

The Cherry Blossom Festival

Each spring the Cupertino Cherry Blossom Festival fills Memorial Park; the 2026 festival ran April 25–26. The trees came from Toyokawa, Japan, a sister city since 1978, which sent 200 cherry trees in 1983. The city also sponsors a farmers market and Shakespeare in the Park among its yearly events.

Cupertino at a glance

Main Street, Vallco and what’s changing

Main Street Cupertino, on Stevens Creek Boulevard, is a newer mixed-use district of shops, restaurants, a hotel, offices, apartments and a town square. The old Vallco site, on North Wolfe Road, began as a business park in the early 1960s and became a regional mall; the mall closed in 2018 and was mostly torn down. The city lists its redevelopment, The Rise, as approved: about 2,669 homes (356 of them affordable), roughly 1.5 million square feet of offices and about 227,000 square feet of retail on 50 acres. As of February 2026, a building permit application was in for the first residential building, 232 affordable homes, per SV@Home; we couldn’t confirm that construction had started by late October 2026.

What homes cost in Cupertino

In the 12 months to October 27, 2026, the median Cupertino house sold for $3.3M ($1,660 per sq ft); the middle half sold between $2.9M and $3.79M, and 71% sold over asking. Condos and townhomes sold for a median of $1.28M, from 65 sales. Neighborhood by neighborhood: Cupertino neighborhoods ranked by price per square foot, Cupertino neighborhoods by their houses and the Cupertino housing market since 2012.

Comparing it with a neighbor? Cupertino vs. Sunnyvale, Cupertino vs. San Jose, Cupertino vs. Santa Clara, Cupertino vs. Mountain View, Cupertino vs. Palo Alto, Cupertino vs. Saratoga, Los Altos vs. Cupertino, Campbell vs. Cupertino, Cupertino vs. Los Gatos.

How we checked

Each fact comes from the source linked beside it, read on October 29, 2026: mostly the City of Cupertino’s own pages, the county’s local agency formation commission, Apple, the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, the National Park Service, Valley Water, Caltrain, Ridge Vineyards and De Anza College. Where sources disagree we used the city’s figure (its facts page gives 11.33 square miles of land; another city page rounds to 13). Home prices are closed MLS sales in the 12 months to October 27, 2026, with duplicate listings removed. We’re not affiliated with Apple or the other places named here.

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