About Tiburon

Tiburon is an incorporated town in Marin County, California. It occupies most of the Tiburon Peninsula, which reaches south into the San Francisco Bay. The smaller city of Belvedere (formerly a separate island) occupies the south-east part of the peninsula and is contiguous with Tiburon. Tiburon is bordered by Corte Madera to the north and Mill Valley to the west, but is otherwise surrounded by the Bay. The population was 8,962 at the 2010 census.

The city's name derives from the Spanish word tiburón, which means "shark". The name was first given to the peninsula on which the city is situated, and probably inspired by the prevalence of locally native leopard sharks in the surrounding waters. Tiburon was formerly the southern terminus of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad. This railroad carried freight, mostly lumber, to the town for transfer to barges for shipping to cities around San Francisco Bay. It is now a commuter and tourist town, linked by fast ferry services to San Francisco and with a concentration of restaurants and clothes shops. It is the nearest mainland point to Angel Island and a regular ferry service connects to the island.

Tiburon has a Town Historian, Branwell Fanning. Much of the modern history material below is drawn from his "Brief History of Tiburon", published in the Town of Tiburon's General Plan.

Tiburón means "shark" in Spanish. Whether Lt. Juan Manuel de Ayala saw a number of sharks near where he anchored the San Carlos in August 1775, off what is now Angel Island, or whether the tree-covered Tiburon Peninsula looked like a shark we may never know. He named the land Punta del Tiburon, or Shark Point. The Coast Miwok Indians had lived here for thousands of years, but there is no clear concept of what they called the peninsula.

The serpentine soils of Ring Mountain and the Tiburon Hills are host to a unique plant community, including several endemic or near-endemic species, notably, the Tiburon mariposa lily, the Tiburon indian paintbrush, and the Tiburon jewelflower, as well as a number of other rare and endangered species Ring Mountain is also a significant location of Native American prehistoric sites, notably rock carvings.