Did You Know?
How did California get its name?
In 1533, Conquistador and Explorer Hernan Cortes made landfall in a bay of what he thought was an island and he called his new discovery “California”, a name he took from a popular romance novel of the time, written by Spanish author Garci Rodrigues de Montalvo, who described an island in the Pacific Ocean as Paradise and that he had named “California”.
