• Bernal-Gulnac-Joice Ranch Historic Site
• Santa Teresa County Park
• Santa Teresa Hills Open Space
• VTA Santa Teresa Light Rail Station

Santa Teresa takes its name from Rancho Santa Teresa, a 9,647-acre land grant awarded in 1834 by Governor José Figueroa to José Joaquín Bernal, a veteran of the 1776 De Anza Expedition who had settled his family near a hillside spring ten miles south of San José in 1826. Bernal named his rancho for Saint Teresa of Ávila, believing that the spring's reputed healing waters were a gift from the Spanish mystic and saint. In 1844, the Treaty of Santa Teresa was signed at the rancho — a peace agreement that temporarily ended hostilities between Governor Manuel Micheltorena and the forces of former Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado. The rancho passed through three generations of the Bernal family before descending through the Gulnac and Joice families, who operated it as a cattle and agricultural ranch until it was sold to IBM in 1980.

IBM established its Silicon Valley Lab on 1,180 acres of former rancho land along Bailey Avenue in Coyote Valley in 1977, creating the first computer programming laboratory in Silicon Valley. The Bernal-Gulnac-Joice Ranch historic site, now part of Santa Teresa County Park, preserves the restored adobe ranch house, barns, and spring that have stood since the rancho era. The Santa Teresa Hills, separating the neighborhood from Almaden Valley, form a significant open space corridor through the southern edge of the city.

MY-NHD's Santa Teresa tee connects the rancho heritage of the Bernal family — soldiers, landholders, and stewards of South San José's most historic landscape — to the community that has grown across their former grant.