Chaparral is a shrubland plant community found primarily in the U.S. state of California, in southern Oregon, and in the northern portion of the Baja California Peninsula in Mexico. It is shaped by a Mediterranean climate (mild, wet winters and hot dry summers) and infrequent, high-intensity crown fires, featuring summer-drought-tolerant plants with hard sclerophyllous evergreen leaves, as contrasted with the associated soft-leaved, drought-deciduous, scrub community of coastal sage scrub, found often on drier, southern facing slopes within the chaparral biome. Three other closely related chaparral shrubland systems occur in central Arizona, western Texas, and along the eastern side of central Mexico's mountain chains (mexical), all having summer rains in contrast to the Mediterranean climate of other chaparral formations. Chaparral comprises 9% of the California's wildland vegetation and contains 20% of its plant species. The name comes from the Spanish word for place of the scrub oak, chaparro.

In its natural state, chaparral is characterized by infrequent fires, with natural fire return intervals ranging between 30 years and over a hundred years. Mature chaparral is characterized by nearly impenetrable, dense thickets.These plants are flammable during the late summer and autumn months when conditions are characteristically hot and dry. They grow as woody shrubs with thick, leathery, and often small leaves, contain green leaves all year and are typically drought resistant. After the first rains following a fire, the landscape is dominated by small flowering herbaceous plants, known as fire followers, which die back with the summer dry period.

Similar plant communities are found in the four other Mediterranean climate regions around the world, including the Mediterranean Basin (where it is known as maquis), central Chile (where it is called matorral), the South African Cape Region (known there as fynbos), and in Western and Southern Australia (as kwongan). According to the California Academy of Sciences, Mediterranean shrubland contains more than 20 percent of the world's plant diversity. The word chaparral is a loanword from Spanish chaparro, meaning place of the scrub oak, which itself comes from a Basque word, txapar, that has the same meaning.

Conservation International and other conservation organizations consider chaparral to be a biodiversity hotspot – a biological community with a large number of different species – that is under threat by human activity.

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