St. Cloud or Saint Cloud (/ˈseɪnt klaʊd/; French: [sɛ̃ klu]) is a city in Stearns County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 68,881 at the 2020 census, making it Minnesota's 12th-most populous city. St. Cloud is the county seat of Stearns County, though it also extends into Benton and Sherburne counties. The city lies along the Mississippi River and is named after Saint-Cloud, a suburb of Paris named for the 6th-century monk Clodoald.

The St. Cloud metropolitan area has an estimated 206,000 residents and is Minnesota's fifth-largest metropolitan statistical area. St. Cloud is 65 miles (105 km) northwest of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis–St. Paul along Interstate 94, U.S. Highway 52 (conjoined with I-94), U.S. Highway 10, Minnesota State Highway 15, and Minnesota State Highway 23. The St. Cloud metropolitan area is included in the greater Minneapolis–St. Paul combined statistical area.

St. Cloud is home to St. Cloud State University, Minnesota's third-largest public university, located near the Beaver Islands, a group of around 30 undeveloped islands in the Mississippi River. These islands, part of a 12-mile designated wild and scenic river segment, attract kayakers and canoeists. The city also owns and operates Minnesota's largest municipally managed hydroelectric dam on the Mississippi River, which generates nearly nine megawatts of electricity, about 10% of the total output from the state's 11 hydroelectric dams on the river.

What is now the St. Cloud area was occupied by various indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Voyageurs and coureurs des bois from New France first encountered the Ojibwe and Dakota through the highly profitable North American fur trade with local Native American peoples.

The Minnesota Territory was organized in 1849. The St. Cloud area opened up to homesteading after the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux was signed with the Dakota people in 1851. John L. Wilson, a Yankee homesteader from Columbia, Maine, with French Huguenot ancestry and an interest in Napoleon, named the settlement St. Cloud after Saint-Cloud, the Paris suburb where Napoleon had his favorite palace.

St. Cloud was a waystation on the Middle and Woods branches of the Red River Trails used by Métis traders between the Canada–U.S. border at Pembina, North Dakota, and Saint Paul, Minnesota. The cart trains often consisted of hundreds of oxcarts known as Red River carts. The Métis, bringing furs to trade for supplies to take back to their rural settlements, camped west of the city and crossed the Mississippi in St. Cloud or just to the north in Sauk Rapids.

The City of St. Cloud was incorporated in 1856. It developed from three distinct settlements, known as Upper Town, Middle Town, and Lower Town, that European-American settlers established starting in 1853. Remnants of the deep ravines that separated the three are still visible today. Middle Town was settled primarily by German Catholic immigrants and migrants from eastern states, who were recruited to the region by Father Francis Xavier Pierz, a Catholic priest who also ministered as a missionary to Native Americans.

Lower Town was founded by settlers from the Northern Tier of New England and the mid-Atlantic states, including former residents of upstate New York. Its Protestant settlers opposed slavery. Upper Town, or Arcadia, was plotted by General Sylvanus Lowry, a slaveholder and trader from Kentucky who brought slaves with him, although Minnesota was organized as a free territory. He served on the territorial council from 1852 to 1853 and was elected president of the newly formed town council in 1856, serving for one year (the office of mayor did not yet exist).