Drive east out of Folsom on Highway 50, past the last of the big-box plazas, and the land begins to roll and green. This is El Dorado Hills, a master-planned town of rolling oak savanna and cul-de-sacs with views of the Sierra foothills. And increasingly, on a Saturday morning, the families filling the Nugget Markets car park and the queue at India Oven in the Town Center are Indian. The story of Indians in El Dorado Hills is a quiet, recent one, written almost entirely in the last fifteen years, and it follows a familiar Silicon Valley logic: good jobs, better schools, and a willingness to commute.
The Place
El Dorado Hills sits on the western edge of El Dorado County, wedged between the city of Folsom to the west and the unincorporated community of Cameron Park to the east, with Folsom Lake to the north and Highway 50 running through the middle. It is unincorporated, a census-designated place rather than a city, which means it has no mayor and no downtown of the old kind.
What it has instead is the Town Center, a one-hundred-acre mixed-use development just south of the highway, and a population that has grown from 42,108 in 2010 to 50,547 in 2020, according to census records. The median household income in 2023 was $163,544, placing it among the highest-earning communities of its size in the country.
It is a place that was designed, not one that simply happened. And that design, it turns out, anticipated the kind of household that would later arrive from Bangalore and Hyderabad by way of the Bay Area.
How It Became Indian
A town drawn on paper
The modern history of El Dorado Hills begins in the early 1960s, when the developer Allan Lindsey set out to build a master-planned community on what had been ranch and grazing land. He hired the Austrian-American architect Victor Gruen, the man who more or less invented the enclosed shopping mall, to draw the master plan.
Gruen imagined a series of residential villages, each with its own commercial, recreational and educational core, strung across the foothills. For decades the reality lagged the vision, and El Dorado Hills remained a sleepy bedroom community. Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, the building accelerated, and the villages filled in.
Intel, and the commute that built a suburb
The thing that turned El Dorado Hills from an affluent commuter town into an Indian-American one was a campus a few miles west. Intel’s large facility in Folsom became one of the anchor employers of the greater Sacramento region, a magnet for software, hardware and chip-design engineers, many of them on H-1B visas from India.
For an engineer relocating from Santa Clara or Cupertino, where a comparable house cost two or three times as much, the logic was hard to resist. A short drive across the county line bought a five-bedroom house with a foothill view, a garage and a lawn, for the price of a townhouse in the South Bay.
The medical professionals
Engineers were not the only arrivals. The Sacramento region’s hospital systems, Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health, UC Davis Health and Mercy among them, drew Indian doctors, pharmacists and biomedical researchers, many of whom settled in El Dorado Hills for the same reasons as the engineers. The result is a community heavy on the two professions Indian immigration to America has long been associated with: technology and medicine.
The schools, which were the real draw
Ask an Indian parent in El Dorado Hills why they moved here, and the answer is rarely the house first. It is the schools. The town is served by three well-regarded districts, Buckeye Union and Rescue Union for the elementary and middle grades, and the El Dorado Union High School District for secondary school.
Oak Ridge High School, the local public high, ranks in the top fifth of California public schools and consistently sends graduates to the University of California campuses and beyond. For families who treat education as the central project of the household, a town where the neighbourhood public school is genuinely excellent is a powerful argument, and word travelled fast through the professional networks that link the Bay Area, Folsom and the foothills.
This pattern, of Indian engineering and medical families clustering in an affluent exurb for the schools, echoes what has happened in places like San Ramon in the East Bay and, on a larger scale, the older Silicon Valley enclaves of Cupertino and Santa Clara. El Dorado Hills is, in a sense, the place those families move to next.
Folsom, the older sibling
El Dorado Hills did not build its Indian community alone. Just across the county line, Folsom had grown its own substantial Indian population a decade earlier, anchored by Intel and by the temples and grocers that followed. For years El Dorado Hills families relied entirely on Folsom for their groceries, their worship and their weekend dosa. The two towns function as a single Indian community split by a county boundary, and the story of Indians in Folsom is really the first chapter of this one.
The Landmarks
India Oven, El Dorado Hills Town Center. A family-owned restaurant in the heart of the Town Center, serving North and South Indian cooking and running a full bar. Its presence inside the town’s flagship development, rather than tucked into a strip mall, is itself a marker of how mainstream the community has become.
Folsom Hindu Temple and Cultural Center, 1710 Prairie City Road, Folsom. The closest full temple to El Dorado Hills, built in the South Indian tradition and home to deities including Sri Amirthakadeswarar, Sri Ganesha and Sri Venkateswara. On festival days its car park fills with vehicles bearing El Dorado Hills addresses.
Sri Venkateshwara Temple, 289 Iron Point Road, Folsom. A newer temple, established around 2020, dedicated to Venkateswara, the form of Vishnu venerated at Tirupati. Its arrival gave the region a second major place of worship and reflects how quickly the local Hindu population has grown.
Nugget Markets, El Dorado Hills. The upscale local grocery chain, whose El Dorado Hills store has steadily expanded its international and South Asian aisles, from basmati rice to fresh curry leaves, in response to who its customers now are. The mainstream supermarket stocking Indian staples is a small but telling index of demographic change.
Sanskrit, Folsom. A modern Indian restaurant that opened in 2019 with the stated aim of bringing a new kind of Indian dining to the Sacramento region, blending North and South Indian cuisine with a contemporary sensibility. It is a short drive for El Dorado Hills diners and a regular weekend destination.
Oak Ridge High School, El Dorado Hills. Not an Indian institution, but arguably the single most important landmark in this story. The reputation of this public high school, in the top fifth of the state, is the reason a great many Indian families chose El Dorado Hills over a dozen comparable suburbs.
El Dorado Hills Town Center. The mixed-use heart of the town, where Diwali brings strings of lights to the shopfronts and where the South Asian families who once drove to Folsom for everything now find a growing share of their lives close to home.
Where They Came From
The Indians of El Dorado Hills came, overwhelmingly, by way of somewhere else in America first. The classic route runs from a university town, often in computer science or engineering, to a first job in the Bay Area, to a transfer or a fresh offer in Folsom, and finally to a house in El Dorado Hills once the children reached school age.
Within India, the origins skew toward the south and west: Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka, the heartlands of the country’s software industry, alongside Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and the Hindi-speaking north. The strong representation of South Indian Hindus is visible in the temples, which lean toward South Indian liturgical tradition.
El Dorado Hills Today
Today the Indian presence in El Dorado Hills is unmistakable without being concentrated in any single enclave. Asian residents made up 11.9 percent of the town in 2020, up from 8.3 percent a decade earlier, the fastest-growing share of any group, and Indian families account for a large and visible portion of that rise. They are spread across the villages rather than clustered on a few streets, which is how an affluent suburb absorbs newcomers.
The signs of the community are in the everyday texture of the place: the Indian grocers and restaurants of the Folsom corridor that El Dorado Hills families rely on, the cricket games that spring up on county fields, the Diwali decorations in the Town Center, the Indian surnames thick on the Oak Ridge High honour roll. The Folsom temples are full on weekends, and a meaningful slice of their congregations drives in from across the county line.
It is, in the end, a community still in its first generation in this particular place. The grandparents are often visiting on long-stay visas rather than living here permanently, and the children are the first cohort to call the foothills home. Whether El Dorado Hills develops the institutional density of an older enclave, its own temple, its own grocers, its own festivals, or remains a residential satellite of Folsom, is a question the next decade will answer.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Indian community in El Dorado Hills?
The town does not publish a separate Indian count, but Asian residents made up 11.9 percent of El Dorado Hills in the 2020 Census, up from 8.3 percent in 2010. Indian families, drawn by technology and medical jobs, account for a large and visibly growing share of that figure, making Indians in El Dorado Hills one of the area’s fastest-rising communities.
Why did so many Indian families move to El Dorado Hills?
Three reasons recur: high-paying engineering jobs at Intel’s Folsom campus and across the Sacramento tech and medical sectors, large houses at a fraction of Bay Area prices, and excellent public schools. For many Indian families in El Dorado Hills, the quality of schools like Oak Ridge High was the deciding factor.
Where is the nearest Hindu temple to El Dorado Hills?
The closest temples are in neighbouring Folsom: the Folsom Hindu Temple and Cultural Center at 1710 Prairie City Road, and the newer Sri Venkateshwara Temple at 289 Iron Point Road. Both serve El Dorado Hills worshippers, who make up a significant part of weekend congregations.
Where do Indian families in El Dorado Hills shop and eat?
India Oven in the El Dorado Hills Town Center serves North and South Indian cuisine, and the local Nugget Markets stocks a growing South Asian range. For specialist groceries and dining, many families drive the short distance into Folsom, where Indian grocers and restaurants such as Sanskrit cluster along the corridor.
How is El Dorado Hills connected to the Indian community in Folsom?
Closely. Folsom built its Indian population a decade earlier around Intel, along with the temples and grocers that followed. El Dorado Hills families relied on Folsom for worship and groceries before their own town caught up, and the two function as a single Indian community divided by a county line.
Is El Dorado Hills a good place for Indian families to settle?
For professional families it has obvious appeal: top-rated schools, large homes, low crime and a high median income of over $160,000. The trade-off is that it is a younger, more dispersed community than the older Bay Area enclaves, with much of its religious and grocery infrastructure still located in neighbouring Folsom.
If your family’s story passed through El Dorado Hills, or any of the places Indians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Telangana or Tamil Nadu, to a first job in the Bay Area, to a house in the El Dorado foothills, to wherever you are now.