Moreno Valley
United States · Americas
About Moreno Valley
Moreno Valley is a city in Riverside County, California, United States, and is part of the Riverside–San Bernardino metropolitan area. It is the second-largest city in Riverside County by population and one of the Inland Empire's population centers. The city's population was 208,634 at the 2020 census. Moreno Valley is also part of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area.
The city derived its name from the small community of Moreno, which became part of the city of Moreno Valley when the city was incorporated in 1984. Frank E. Brown, one of the founders of the community of Moreno in 1882, declined to have the town named after him, but to honor him, the town was named Moreno, Spanish for brown.
The Moreno Valley area was first inhabited 2,300 years ago. There are at least 200 prehistoric archaeological locations within the city. The majority of the sites are milling stations – where chaparral seed was the dominant milling activity. Rock art, consisting of pictographs, and petroglyphs are present – though most of the petroglyphs in Moreno Valley consist of boulders with "cupules", or cup-shaped holes pecked into them.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA. Photography via Wikimedia Commons.