Congratulations to Las Montañas Supermarket!

Las Montañas was recognized as the Best Place to buy Latino Groceries from the annual Best of the East Bay Awards for 2025 as published in the East Bay Times online e-newspaper.

Located at 13901 San Pablo Avenue, Las Montañas (Spanish for mountains) is known for being a popular choice for Latino groceries, offering a wide selection of authentic Mexican and Latin American foods; national and international.

Las Montañas Supermarket, which opened here in April 2011, specializes in providing a vast selection of fresh and authentic specialty grocery items. Within the organized and well-stocked aisles of their Supermarket you will find an extensively wide variety of imported products from Mexico, Latin America, and other parts of the world. The store is known for its fresh produce and quality meats, making it a convenient one-stop shop for all your grocery needs. They also have a taqueria inside the store with a variety of popular dishes, including tacos, carne asada,  and more with fresh tortillas made daily using only the highest quality ingredients.

But did you know, the building and location itself has a history of its own?

Before this popular Latino grocery was established, this building and the property it sits on has a unique history. 

In the 1950s, it was a Norwalk service station and later a Hancock Oil company service station (purchased by Signal in 1958, the Norwalk brand survived until Signal sold off their west coast marketing holdings in 1970; Hancock were sold to Humble Oil in 1965). 

By 1973, it was an auto tune-up business and later reverted back to a gas station.  However, in 1974, changes to the area were coming and the gas station was advertised to be "disassembled" to make way for a brand-new hardware store.  Below is a timeline in news clippings.

But wait...there's more!  Before the building that housed Handyman Hardware could be built in 1974, the city of San Pablo, as part of an El Portal Redevelopment Project had to move a house that was at the SW corner of Standard Avenue near Van Ness Avenue. The home belonged to the Teixeira family, and it would need to be moved before construction could proceed. 

Here is a partial history of Luzia "Lucy" Bettencourt Teixeira and her historic home at 2032 Van Ness Avenue. In a Richmond Independent article by Eleanor Edwards dated November 13, 1975, she wrote the following:

The changes 60 years bring.

History of a house and its people by ELEANOR EDWARDS  —  I-G Staff Writer

SAN PABLO — The house has changed a lot in the past 60 years — it is larger, it has modern conveniences and it even has a new location. The area has changed, too. Where once there were open fields nearby there is now a large hardware store and a planned civic center complex. But Mrs. Lucy Teixeira says she is happy with her "new” house, relocated by the City of San Pablo as part of the Alvarado Square project. “They fixed it up real nice,” Mrs. Teixeira told a visitor recently, “I never thought it would be this way. The city asked me if I like it and I said yes.” The house had been at 2032 Van Ness — where the new Handyman store is now. As part of the redevelopment plan of the entire Alvarado Square area, the San Pablo Redevelopment Agency bought the house — one of the oldest in the city — and relocated it a few hundred yards closer to the soon-to-be built civic center as a future historical landmark. Mrs. Teixeira has life tenancy of the house.

Mrs. Teixeira pointed to a photograph of a tall man standing in front of a white frame house surrounded by a picket fence. It was the house as it looked about 1915. The man was her husband, William, who died in 1958. “I showed the city this picture and they put the fence back like it was.” she said. She explained that her husband bought part of the house about 10 years before their marriage in 1916 and had it moved from the country to San Pablo using a team of horses. He gradually added onto the original four-room house during his vacations from work at Standard Oil. Mrs. Teixeira remembers when the toilet was in the outhouse and the stove was heated with coal. Her husband installed electricity after the final addition several years after their marriage. Mrs. Teixeira met her husband at a hotel dining room, owned by her sister and brother-in-law. She had come to California from the Portuguese Azores in 1909 when she was 15.

She was one of 11 children, seven of whom eventually came to live in the United States. Last month Mrs. Teixeira was reunited briefly with one of her sisters Anna Silva whom she had not seen in over 60 years.

In the Azores Mrs. Teixeira and her brothers and sisters worked on a farm, picking potatoes and corn. Here she worked on a ranch in Sebastopol owned by an aunt. “I worked on the ranch for three years picking fruit, milking cows and riding horses all over the range, she remembers. “I didn’t like it too much because the work was hard.” So she came to San Pablo to work in her sister’s San Pablo hotel. “Lots of Portuguese came there to eat because there no other place. We gave lots of meat, lots of soup for 25 cents." She and  William were married Dec 23, 1916, and they took a one-week honeymoon to San Francisco — Mrs. Teixeira’s first trip to the city. When they returned to San Pablo on New Year’s Eve they were feted with a big party at the hotel. Shortly afterwards they moved into the frame house on Van Ness, where they had four children: former San Pablo fire chief Manuel Teixeira, Eugene Teixeira of San Pablo, Mrs. Mary Crakow of El Cerrito, and another son who died.

“There were no houses over here then,” Mrs. Teixeira recalls. “Van Ness didn’t go all the way through and there were fields all around the house. We had cows, pigs, chickens and rabbits and a garden with beans corn and potatoes.’’ The area has changed greatly in the 55 years since she was a bride, but Mrs. Teixeira says she is happy with the changes. She especially enjoys having the Handyman store next door, because she  likes watching the people come and go, she says. And she is looking forward to the completion of Alvarado Square, the renovation of the Blume House next door and the construction of the civic center.

The Teixeira home is now a part of the San Pablo Historical Society's museums. 

Read more about it here.

Here is a Sanborn map from 1928 showing the area around 13901 San Pablo Avenue.

At right is Church Lane and at left is Pullman Avenue. Bordering "Alvarado" Road between these two streets is a Dance Hall and a Blacksmith Shop where Las Montañas Supermarket decades later would be built.

If you enjoyed reading the history of this store, its predecessors and an historic home, let us know your thoughts with comments on our Facebook page. Thank you!