Despite the fact that more than 70 years have passed since Lorente de Nó originally described the CA2 subfield, the significance of the many unique morphological and physiological properties of area CA2 is only beginning to be understood. In addition to participating in canonical hippocampal circuits known to underlie spatial processing, area CA2 is crucial for the consolidation of socially relevant information into long-term memory, and may also play a part in temporal encoding. With the advent of tools that enable targeting of genetically defined cell populations, we expect rapid progress to be made in further characterizing the functions of area CA2. Finally, given the findings that CA2 is particularly resistant to certain types of damage, area CA2 has emerged as an important region to study in models of disease characterized by impairments in spatial, social, temporal and memory processing.