Colma is a small town in San Mateo County, California, at the northern end of the San Francisco Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area. The population was 1,191 at the 2000 census.
Much of the land of Colma is dedicated to cemetery usage. With 17 cemeteries for the interment of human beings and one for pets, the dead population outnumber the living by tens of thousands to one. This has led to it being called "the city of the silent", and also led to a more humorous motto among some residents: "It's great to be alive in Colma". Due to its precarious position along the San Andreas fault, San Francisco is sometimes called "The city that waits to die", leading to one of Colma's more morbid nicknames: "The city that waits for the city that waits to die to die".
Colma became the location of a large number of cemeteries when San Francisco, the town's powerful neighbor to the north, passed an ordinance in 1900 outlawing the construction of any more cemeteries in the city (mainly because of increased property values making the cost of using land for cemeteries prohibitive), and then passed another ordinance in 1912 evicting all existing cemeteries from city limits. (A similar scenario prevails in New York City's borough of Manhattan, where only one active cemetery still exists — the Trinity Church Cemetery and Crematory, at the intersection of 155th Street and Broadway, on the northwestern edge of Harlem). The relocation of cemeteries from San Francisco to Colma is the subject of A Second Final Rest: The History of San Francisco's Lost Cemeteries, (2005) a documentary by Trina Lopez.
Colma was briefly called Lawndale, but because another city with the name Lawndale, California already existed, the town changed its name back to Colma in 1941.
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