Cam Ranh's deepest roots belong to peoples who arrived here long before the Vietnamese state extended this far south. The Champa kingdom, which flourished along the central Vietnamese coast for centuries, maintained Cam Ranh as an important military and commercial center. The Cham, Rade (Êđê), and Raglai peoples all made their lives in this landscape — fishing its bay, farming its narrow coastal plain, trading through its natural harbor. The Rade name, Kăm Mran, predates the Vietnamese one; the Champa presence predates both. When Vietnamese settlers arrived in the early modern period, they moved into a landscape already shaped by older cultures, and those cultures did not disappear. The Cham and Raglai communities have persisted in the region — you can still find Raglai villages in the hills of nearby Núi Chúa National Park today, descendants of the people who were here first.

The French colonial government formalized its presence here in 1939, establishing the Ba Ngòi Administrative Agency and beginning the construction of a military base that would grow through successive occupations. Cam Ranh Airport dates from this period. After 1954, the South Vietnamese government continued developing the site, adding new facilities at the Cam Ranh Military Station. Then came the Americans, who transformed the entire bay during the Vietnam War into one of their most important logistical installations in Southeast Asia — a port, an airfield, a depot, a naval air facility, a communications station. At its peak the Cam Ranh Support Command was authorized nearly 8,000 personnel. Civilians who passed through Cam Ranh during those years remember a landscape of sand, construction, and heat, the bay glittering behind a skyline of cranes and hangars.

North Vietnamese forces captured Cam Ranh Bay on 3 April 1975. Within four years, Soviet Pacific Fleet personnel were moving into the facilities that American engineers had built on the same sand. The Soviets occupied the base until 2002, when the Russian flag was lowered for the last time and sole control reverted to Vietnam. The city of Cam Ranh that emerged from this history was formally elevated to city status by government resolution on December 23, 2010. The bureaucratic language was dry — Resolution 65/NQ-CP, establishing the city based on the entire area and population of Cam Ranh town — but it marked a genuine turning point: a place defined for decades by its role in other people's wars finally governing itself as a Vietnamese city.

Today's Cam Ranh has Cam Ranh International Airport for its northern gateway and Ba Ngòi Port as its commercial harbor, both legacies of the military infrastructure that earlier powers installed. The airport, once a tactical fighter base and one of three aerial ports for American troops rotating through South Vietnam, now handles international passenger flights. The port handles cargo. The climate is tropical savanna — hot and relatively dry, in keeping with the regional pattern of south-central Vietnam — though not as extreme as Ninh Thuận Province to the south. Streets like Hùng Vương Avenue and roundabouts that suggest a city with room to plan, a city with a future rather than just a past, have replaced some of the wartime installations. Resorts line sections of the coast. The bay, which has hosted the navies of France, Russia, Japan, the United States, and Vietnam, is now also a place where people come on holiday.