El Cerrito (Spanish for "The Little Hill") is a city in Contra Costa County, California, United States, and forms part of the San Francisco Bay Area. It has a population of 25,962 according to the 2020 census. El Cerrito was founded by refugees from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It was incorporated in 1917 as a village with 1,500 residents. As of the census in 2000, there were 23,171 people, 10,208 households and 5,971 families in the city.

El Cerrito was founded by refugees from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. They settled in what was then Don Víctor Castro's Rancho San Pablo, and adjacent to the ranch owned by the family of Luís María Peralta, the Rancho San Antonio. A post office opened at the settlement in 1909 and the refugee camp became known as Rust, after Wilhelm F. Rust, its first postmaster. The village's residents did not care for the name and changed it to El Cerrito (meaning "little hill" or "knoll") in 1916, in reference to the many individual hills in the village. A year later, El Cerrito was incorporated as a village with 1,500 residents.

El Cerrito was incorporated in August 1917. The communities of Stege Junction, Rust, Schmidtville, and Schindler, were all included in the new city.The 1920 census shows that the Schmidtville community had many Italian immigrants. A post office operated at Schmidtville from 1900 to 1901.

Geography

Albany Hill in neighboring Albany, California, named by Luis María Peralta as "El Cerrito de San Antonio" ("The Little Hill of St. Anthony"), is the namesake of the city.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 3.7 square miles, all of it land. The city ranges in elevation from 20 to 934 feet, with an average elevation of 69 feet).

El Cerrito is located on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in the extreme south-west corner of Contra Costa County. The hilly areas of El Cerrito provide views of its neighboring city, and of the Golden Gate Bridge. El Cerrito is located along Interstate 80, and nearby Interstate 580. El Cerrito is bordered by Albany and Kensington to the south, the Richmond annex to the west, East Richmond Heights to the north, and Wildcat Canyon Regional Park to the east. Local landmark Albany Hill is in Albany, just across the border with El Cerrito. (El Cerrito—Spanish, "the little hill"—takes its name from Albany Hill.)The Hayward Fault runs through El Cerrito. In addition, El Cerrito is within 490 feet of Berkeley to the southeast, and approximately 5 miles from the University of California Berkeley campus.