New Almaden, San Jose, CA

New Almaden is the oldest chapter in the whole valley's story, and it still lives like one. This was California's first major mining district, where in 1845 Ohlone guides led the Mexican engineer Andres Castillero to cinnabar outcrops in the hills, and within a year Barron, Forbes and Company were mining mercury here, the quicksilver that made Gold Rush ore extraction possible. At its peak more than 3,000 people lived across three camps, the Hacienda down in the valley, the Mexican miners of Spanishtown, and the Cornish miners of Englishtown up on Mine Hill. The whole district was named a National Historic Landmark in 1961. Today the village strings along Almaden Road as it narrows and climbs into the Capitancillos Hills, and the centerpiece is Casa Grande, the three-story 1850s mine-manager's mansion that now houses the New Almaden Quicksilver Mining Museum. Wrapped around it is Almaden Quicksilver County Park, thousands of acres laced with roughly fifty miles of old tunnels and shafts and the brick furnace ruins of the camps, so the trail access here is close to unmatched anywhere in San Jose. There is real literary history in these hills too: the writer Mary Hallock Foote lived here in the 1870s, and her letters became the basis for Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer-winning novel Angle of Repose. What you trade for all that is convenience. There is essentially no retail in the village, a grocery run is a long drive, the road is narrow and slow, and the wooded, wildland setting makes fire season a genuine part of life. It is a small, history-soaked pocket for people who want trees, quiet and a sense of the past more than sidewalks and shops. Nobody ends up in New Almaden by accident, and that is precisely the appeal.