The Cahuilla people inhabited the valley for thousands of years, using its mountain canyons for summer shade and the valley floor's artesian water — discovered by later settlers to be abundant beneath the surface — for agriculture. Edward Fitzgerald Beale surveyed the region in 1857 using a party that crossed the desert with camels, testing whether the animals could serve as military transport in the Southwest. The Southern Pacific Railroad arrived later in the nineteenth century, and the discovery of artesian wells made sustained habitation economically viable for more settlers. U.S. Route 99 came through in 1926, and State Highway 111 followed in the early 1930s, completing the transportation infrastructure that opened agriculture, commerce, and tourism to the rest of the country.

The valley produces nearly 95 percent of American dates — a crop introduced in the 1890s when the USDA imported date palm shoots recognizing that the region's extreme heat and alkaline soil matched the conditions of the Middle East and North Africa where dates had been cultivated for millennia. The Riverside County Fair and National Date Festival in Indio celebrates this agricultural identity each February with camel racing and date-food competitions. The San Gorgonio Pass at the valley's northwest entrance is the second windiest place in the country; the thousands of wind turbines of the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm are among the first things visible to anyone driving in from the Los Angeles Basin. Total agricultural production in the valley exceeds $600 million annually.

The Coachella Valley became a Hollywood retreat in the 1930s when Charles Farrell and Ralph Bellamy founded the Racquet Club of Palm Springs — drawing Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Mary Pickford, and others who needed somewhere warm and close to the studios. Bing Crosby founded the Blue Skies Trailer Park in Rancho Mirage, famous for expensive trailers each designed with its own theme. Frank Capra worked on screenplays at La Quinta. The celebrity connection continued through subsequent decades and shaped Palm Springs into one of the most architecturally documented mid-century modern cities in America — a catalog of post-war optimism built in the desert for people who could afford to escape it.

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has taken place on the polo grounds of Empire Polo Club in Indio each April since 1999, growing into the highest-grossing music festival in the United States. Stagecoach Country Music Festival follows on the same grounds. The BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament at Indian Wells has reached an attendance of nearly 500,000 in a two-week period — the best-attended tennis event outside the four Grand Slams — at a stadium with 16,100 seats, the second largest permanent tennis facility in the world. The valley's capacity to host mass gatherings reflects a combination of consistent weather, abundant land, and infrastructure built initially to serve the resort economy.