History of Tampa, Florida
Tampa is a United States city in Hillsborough County, on the west coast of Florida. It serves as the county seat for Hillsborough County. The population within the city limits in 2006, according to the City Government was 334,550. It is the third-largest city in Florida, behind Jacksonville and Miami.
Tampa is a part of the Tampa Bay Area most commonly referred to as the "Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area". The four-county area is composed of roughly 2.7 million residents, making it the second largest United States metropolitan area in the state, and the third largest in the Southeastern United States. The continuous Tampa Bay urban area reached a rare milestone earlier than expected in April of 2007 by passing the 4 million population mark. The area also gains an unexpected 97,000 people a year since the turn of the century, pushing the current population to numbers that were not expected for another decade. It is the largest media market in the state of Florida and twelfth largest Media market in the United States.
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