Where to Stay in Delano, California

What is Delano known for?

The Forty Acres and the National Farm Workers Association Headquarters are the two landmarks logged here, and both belong to the organising of agricultural workers in the San Joaquin Valley rather than to anything the city built for visitors. Agriculture is the rest of it. Delano sits on the valley floor north-northwest of Bakersfield, a working town of Kern County before it is anything else.

What are the main landmarks in Delano?

Two names carry the whole list. The Forty Acres and the National Farm Workers Association Headquarters sit side by side on the landmark record of Delano, and together they account for everything the city has entered against its name. No third name follows.

That makes the visit a specific one: the farm-labour history of the San Joaquin Valley rather than a monument trail, with the rest of Kern County's set pieces lying down the road toward Bakersfield.

What is the history of Delano?

Delano dates from 1869. That places its founding a long way before the farm-labour history its landmark record is built around, and the city grew through the intervening century into the second largest place in Kern County behind Bakersfield. The San Joaquin Valley makes up the lower half of the Central Valley, and Delano sits on that floor about thirty miles from Bakersfield.

Farm work supplied the living. Delano became a centre of farm-labour organising in the Central Valley, and The Forty Acres and the National Farm Workers Association Headquarters are what the landmark record retains of that. The two sites are close together in meaning.

The Forty Acres names a piece of ground rather than a building, which is the older way of marking a place in the San Joaquin Valley, while the headquarters entry carries the name of the National Farm Workers Association instead. Delano kept both. That is unusual for a working city of the Central Valley, where the record of the twentieth century is more often written in fields and machinery than in anything a visitor can walk up to and read.

Bakersfield holds the county's larger record, and Delano's is narrower and sharper for it.

Where is Delano?

Delano occupies about thirty-seven square kilometres of the San Joaquin Valley floor, ground so level that the city's edge is a matter of where the streets stop and the fields resume. Elevation runs just over three hundred feet. Bakersfield lies roughly thirty miles to the south-south-east, and the Central Valley continues past both of them in every direction, which is the whole of the local topography.

The Forty Acres sits on the same flat ground.

What is the climate of Delano?

The valley makes the weather here. Delano lies in the temperate band on the floor of the San Joaquin Valley, where the enclosed ground holds heat through the long middle of the year and gives it up only at the far end of the season. Finding shade beats picking a month.

An hour outdoors at The Forty Acres is best taken early for much of the year, and the same holds anywhere between Delano and Bakersfield.

How do you get to Delano?

Bakersfield is the way in. Delano has no airport of its own, so arrivals come up the San Joaquin Valley by road from the larger city about thirty miles away, and the drive is flat and direct the whole distance. Expect to be behind the wheel.

The Forty Acres and the National Farm Workers Association Headquarters are both reached that way, and so is anywhere else in this part of Kern County.