page_title: San Luis Obispo County, California
section_title: Geography
hierarchical_section_title: San Luis Obispo County, California / Geography
caption_attribution_description: English: San Luis Obispo looking east from the top of Bishop Peak. There is some rain in the background.
context_page_description: San Luis Obispo County, officially the County of San Luis Obispo, is a county on the Central Coast of California. As of the 2010 census, the population was 269,637. The county seat is San Luis Obispo.
  Junípero Serra founded the Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa in 1772 and downtown San Luis Obispo grew around the Mission. The small size of the county's communities, scattered along the beaches, coastal hills, and mountains of the Santa Lucia range, provides a wide variety of coastal and inland hill ecologies to support fishing, agriculture, and tourist activities.
  California Polytechnic State University has almost 20,000 students. Tourism, especially for the wineries, is popular. Grapes and other agriculture products are an important part of the economy. San Luis Obispo County is the third largest producer of wine in California, surpassed only by Sonoma and Napa counties. Strawberries are the largest agricultural crop in the county.
  The town of San Simeon is located at the foot of the ridge where newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst built Hearst Castle. Other coastal towns include Cambria, Cayucos, Morro Bay, and Los Osos -Baywood Park.
context_section_description: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 3,616 square miles (9,370 km²), of which 3,299 square miles (8,540 km²) is land and 317 square miles (820 km²) (8.8%) is water.
caption: San Luis Obispo
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