Sacramento is the capital of California, a flat, tree-shaded city of about half a million people at the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers in the northern end of California's Central Valley. It has none of the glamour of Los Angeles or the Bay Area, and few travellers make it a destination in its own right — which is a pity, because Sacramento is where California actually happened. When John Sutter built his fort here in 1839 and gold was discovered 50 km east at Coloma in 1848, the city became the supply centre of the Gold Rush, the terminus of the Pony Express, and the western end of the first transcontinental railroad. Almost every foundational story of California's rise passes through Sacramento at some point.
The past is preserved most vividly in Old Sacramento, a 26-acre national historic district of cobbled streets, wooden plank sidewalks and restored 1850s–1870s buildings down by the river. Inside this district is the California State Railroad Museum, widely considered the best railroad museum in North America — 21 restored locomotives (several of them working), rolling stock you can walk through, and superb exhibits on the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad. A short walk from there, Sutter's Fort (a reconstruction on the original site) is where it all began. Up the hill, the grand neoclassical California State Capitol, completed in 1874, is open to visitors; the surrounding Capitol Park is a 40-acre arboretum with trees from every continent. The Crocker Art Museum, founded in 1885 and the oldest public art museum west of the Mississippi, has a good collection of 19th-century Californian painting and an impressive new wing of European and contemporary art.
Beyond the sights, Sacramento has in the last decade developed a surprisingly serious food scene — the city declared itself "America's Farm-to-Fork Capital" in 2012, and has real grounds for the claim given the productivity of the Central Valley farmland around it. The Midtown neighbourhood on J and K streets is where most of the good restaurants, coffee places and breweries are. The R Street Corridor in the adjacent warehouse district has Sacramento's best gallery scene and a growing number of restaurants. The American River Parkway gives the city a 32-mile cycling and jogging corridor that most state capitals can only envy.