Santa Monica, CA is an independent coastal city in Los Angeles County, California, home to roughly 90,000 residents across 8.4 square miles of Westside beachfront.
Santa Monica occupies the northern curve of Santa Monica Bay, bounded by the Pacific Ocean on the west and enclosed on its remaining sides by the city of 📝Los Angeles, CA, with 📝Venice, CA immediately to the south. Residents voted to incorporate on November 30, 1886, and the municipal footprint has changed little since. The 2020 census counted 93,082 residents; 2025 estimates place the population near 90,000, a modest decline.
Civic identity centers on the Santa Monica Pier, opened in 1909 and still the best-known pleasure pier on the West Coast, and on the Third Street Promenade, a pedestrianized retail corridor a few blocks inland on a street that has anchored downtown commerce since the 1890s. The city is also popularly celebrated as the western end of U.S. Route 66, marked by an "End of the Trail" sign on the pier.
Since the early 2000s Santa Monica has served as the northern anchor of 📝Silicon Beach, the Westside technology corridor running south through Venice and Marina del Rey to Playa Vista. 📝Google opened its first Los Angeles office in Santa Monica in 2003, and the corridor now hosts several hundred technology companies, giving a beach town of fewer than 100,000 people an outsized role in Southern California's technology economy.