US Map / Cities / Stockton

Stockton Map

Stockton is an ocean port 80 miles from the ocean, sitting where the San Joaquin Valley's farmland runs into the maze of islands and levees of the Delta.

Where is Stockton?

Stockton is in the northern San Joaquin Valley of California, on the flat valley floor at roughly 13 feet above sea level. Sacramento is about 45 miles north up the Central Valley, San Francisco some 80 miles west across the Coast Ranges, Oakland roughly 70 miles west, and Fresno about 130 miles south down the same valley. The Altamont Pass commute to the Bay Area runs from here, and a large share of Stockton's growth since the 1990s has come from people priced out of the coastal counties.

Stockton at a glance

Stockton in California

Stockton is the seat of San Joaquin County and its largest city by a long way; the California county map shows the county wedged between the Delta and the Sierra foothills. The Central Valley's chain of cities — Sacramento north, Stockton and Modesto in the middle, Fresno and Bakersfield south — is agricultural in a way the coast is not, and San Joaquin County alone grows a large share of the country's asparagus, cherries and walnuts. The California state page sets the valley against the coast and the mountains.

Where the valley meets the Delta

Stockton is a deepwater seaport because of a dredged channel: the Stockton Deepwater Shipping Channel runs about 78 miles from the port through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay to the Golden Gate, and ocean ships reach the city on it. The Delta itself begins at Stockton's western edge — a network of sloughs and reclaimed islands where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers meet the tide. Those islands were peat bogs before they were farmed; drained and cultivated, the peat oxidized and the ground sank, so many of them now sit well below sea level behind levees, and a levee failure floods an island outright. The city itself is threaded with waterways, and the Sierra Nevada snowpack that feeds them is visible from town on a clear winter day.

Cities near Stockton

Sacramento is nearest, with Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose over the hills to the west and Fresno down the valley. The Sierra Nevada page covers the range whose snowmelt fills the channels and canals that make farming here possible.