Los Altos

Welcome to Los Altos

The seven square miles of tree-lined city Los Altos is centrally located (40 miles south of San Francisco) along the San Francisco Peninsula corridor. Los Altos real estate is loved for the area's spectacular climate as well as its charming small village atmosphere. Originally an agricultural town with many summer cottages and apricot orchards, Los Altos is now a bedroom community on the western edge of Silicon Valley that traditionally limits commercial zoning to the downtown area and small shopping strips and office parks along Foothill Expressway and El Camino Real. The population numbers 28,976 residents according to the 2010 US Census. In 1976, Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the first fifty Apple 1 computers in Jobs’s garage in Los Altos. LA is where Mark Zuckerberg and a few associates scaled-up Facebook from 200,000 to 2.5 million members in 2004.

Los Altos is a city in northern Santa Clara County and in the heart of Silicon Valley. The name translates from “the heights” in Spanish. Los Altos is bordered by Santa Clara County neighbors: (Los Altos Hills to the west, Palo Alto to the north and west, Mountain View to the north and east, Sunnyvale to the east, and Cupertino to the southeast). LA is intersected by three creeks that flow into the San Francisco Bay: Adobe, Permanente, and Stevens Creeks, and one of its tributaries, Hale Creek).

In 1906, Southern Pacific Railroad executive, Paul Shoup, and his colleagues formed Altos Land Company and started developing. They acquired 140 acres of land from heiress Sarah Winchester, as Shoup wanted to link Palo Alto and Los Gatos by making Los Altos a commuter town. In 1908, Southern Pacific Railroad began a steam train service through Los Altos running five trains a day, and in 1913, the craftsman-style Los Altos train station made its debut on First Street.

​​​​​​​By 1949, many residents were dissatisfied with the Santa Clara County zoning policies and the threat of annexation by neighboring Palo Alto and Mountain View, so they decided to incorporate. Los Altos became the 11th city in Santa Clara County on December 1, 1952.