When your state has nearly as many people as the entire nation of Canada, it’s unavoidable that certain cities in the Golden State will fall by the memory’s wayside, which is exactly what happened in California of late.
That’s because certain cities in the state were more forgettable than others, with Central Valley agricultural hotspot Bakersfield beating out the home of Snoop Dogg and countless other rappers (Long Beach) and fellow Central Valley metropolis, Fresno, in a recent survey.
BetCalifornia.com wondered which big California cities tend to be forgotten the most. A quiz on Sporcle.com asked respondents to fill in the blanks for the top 10 most populous cities in California. We then ranked the cities based on the percentage of people who remembered them within the quiz’s time limit.
Rank | City | % Guessed Correctly |
1 | Bakersfield | 46.3% |
2 | Long Beach | 48.0% |
3 | Fresno | 55.2% |
4 | Anaheim | 56.6% |
5 | Oakland | 74.4% |
6 | San José | 75.8% |
7 | Sacramento | 87.3% |
8 | San Diego | 94.8% |
9 | San Francisco | 96.1% |
10 | Los Angeles | 98.8% |
With a correct guess percentage of 46.3%, Bakersfield was the lucky recipient of being California’s most forgotten city of 2025, beating out Long Beach’s percentage of 48.0%, while Fresno was third statewide, at 55.2%.
Throw in Orange County hotspot Anaheim at 56.6% and Bay Area mainstays Oakland (47.4%) and San José (75.8%) and you have most of the California list covered, with the state capital of Sacramento (87.3%), San Diego (94.8%), San Francisco (96.1%) and Los Angeles (98.8%) still very fresh in folks' minds in the Golden State.
At day’s end, however, no city on the Left Coast got as little love as the home of country star Buck Owens, as Bakersfield finished atop California’s forgotten cities list for 2025, with the Kern County outpost being easy to forget about apparently.
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USA Today photo by Jay Calderon.
Author
Christopher Boan is the lead writer at BetCalifornia.com, specializing in sports betting issues in the western United States. He's covered sports and sports betting in Arizona for more than seven years, including stops at ArizonaSports.com, the Tucson Weekly and the Green Valley News.
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