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San Luis Obispo County is a county located on the central Pacific coast of the U.S. state of California, between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. As of 2000 its population was 246,681. The county seat is San Luis Obispo, with about 45,000 residents. The county's distance from the large metro areas of San Francisco and Los Angeles has helped it to retain its rural character and reminders of old California abound. Father Junipero Serra founded the Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa in 1772 and the Mission is today an active part of downtown San Luis Obispo. 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 many kinds of fishing, agriculture and tourist activities. The mainstays of the economy are California Polytechnic State University with its 18,000 students, tourism, agriculture, and other government services, including the California Men's Colony, a penal institution. San Luis Obispo County is the third largest producer of wine in California, surpassed only by Sonoma and Napa Counties. Wine grapes are by far the largest agricultural crop in the county, and the wine production they support creates a direct economic impact and a growing wine country vacation industry. Other towns include Cambria, with several small resort hotels and bed and breakfasts on the coast, where visitors can see sea otters frolicking in the surf just outside their hotel windows. Just north of Cambria is San Simeon, at the foot of the Enchanted Hill where newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst built Hearst Castle. Just south of Cambria lies Harmony, the smallest town in California with a population of 18. Other coastal towns include Morro Bay and Cayucos to the north of San Luis Obispo city, and Avila Beach, California and the so-called Five Cities to the south: Arroyo Grande, Grover Beach, Halcyon, Oceano, and Pismo Beach. Nipomo, just south of the Five Cities, borders northern Santa Barbara County. Inland, the cities of Paso Robles, Templeton, and Atascadero lie along the Salinas River, near the Paso Robles wine region.
History
Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa was founded on September 1, 1772 in the area that is now the city of San Luis Obispo. San Luis Obispo County was one of the original counties of California, created in 1850 at the time of statehood. Timeline
Population History
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