Sunnyvale is one of the larger cities of Silicon Valley, sitting between Mountain View and Santa Clara on the southern shore of San Francisco Bay. Until the second world war it was orchard country — apricots, prunes, and the world's largest fruit cannery, Libby's, whose painted water tower still stands as a landmark. The semiconductor industry arrived in the 1950s and the orchards gradually became chip fabs, then office parks, then the headquarters of companies like LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Juniper. About 150,000 people now live in the city.
The downtown, around Murphy Avenue, is a pleasant pedestrian-friendly stretch of restaurants and shops and the closest thing the city has to a centre. North of the freeway is the industrial belt where NASA Ames and Moffett Field — with their famous blimp hangars — back onto the bay. South and west, the residential neighbourhoods are quiet, leafy, and very expensive.
The single best historical visit is the apricot orchard at Heritage Park, preserved as a memorial to the valley before the silicon. Sunnyvale is rarely a destination in itself, but it is a sensible and well-located base for exploring the south bay, and a much more pleasant place to walk around than most of its neighbours.