Idaho's capital with the world's largest Basque community outside Spain — where Boise sits at 2,730 feet at the foot of the Boise Front Range where the Snake River Plain's high desert meets the timbered foothills of the Boise National Forest, the Basque Block (a 200-metre stretch of Grove Street containing the deepest Basque cultural community in the diaspora — a legacy of 1900s Basque sheepherders recruited from the Pyrenees to manage Idaho's open-range rangelands) is the most unusual ethnic enclave in the American West, the Boise River Greenbelt (a 40-km paved trail connecting 850 acres of riverside parks, where tubing the Boise River from Barber Park to Ann Morrison Park is the defining summer activity) runs through the city centre, Freak Alley Gallery (a 2-block alley of annually-repainted murals covering entire building walls) is the largest outdoor mural gallery in Idaho, and the State Capitol is one of two US state capitols heated by geothermal water drilled directly beneath the building
Boise (240,000 city; 780,000 metro) is the capital and largest city of Idaho — one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the United States in the 2010s–2020s, driven primarily by migration from California and the Pacific Northwest. Boise is home to Micron Technology (the only major US manufacturer of DRAM memory chips) and HP (which split its printer division to Boise), making it the largest technology employer in the Pacific Northwest interior.
The Boise Valley was the traditional territory of the Shoshone-Paiute people for thousands of years before the Oregon Trail brought European American settlers through the valley from the 1840s. 'Les Bois' — the wooded place — was what French Canadian trappers called the cottonwood-lined Boise River, the first significant trees westbound Oregon Trail travellers had seen for hundreds of miles. Gold was discovered in the Boise Basin in 1862, bringing 16,000 miners to Idaho Territory within a year and establishing Boise as a supply hub. The Basque sheepherder migration that began around 1900 crea…