In the latest example of a deal to preserve the rural landscape between San Jose and Morgan Hill that was once planned to be the world headquarters for Cisco and Apple, a Palo Alto environmental group has bought 207 acres on the hillsides overlooking Coyote Valley for $5.5 million.

The property, a former farm owned by Wilfred Eberhardt “Dutch” Holthouse, who died in 1977, sits off Bailey Avenue, adjacent to Calero County Park.

The scenic landscape is an important wildlife corridor between the Diablo Range and the Santa Cruz Mountains for mountain lions, bobcats, deer and other species. It will be kept in cattle grazing, blocking it being carved up for a handful of large trophy homes, said Gordon Clark, president of the land trust, which is commonly called POST.

“There were plans for massive and extensive commercial and industrial development in the Coyote Valley area,” Clark said. “But the public and elected officials decided to pursue a permanently protected mosaic of lands for wildlife, farming and public open space instead.”

POST has preserved 90,000 acres of open space since 1977 in Santa Clara, San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, including beaches and farms along the San Mateo coast, ranches in the Peninsula foothills, and open space in South San Jose.

Clark said his organization will discuss transferring the property to park and open space agencies in the coming years, including potentially the Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation Department, which owns the adjacent Calero County Park, a 4,471-acre property well-known for its spring wildflower blooms, trails and Calero Reservoir.

The Holthouse family owned the land for three generations. The family sold more than 970 acres it owned when the property was larger in 1975 to IBM, which has a campus at the northern end of Coyote Valley.

“My brother and I would go there in the summertime and spend two or three weeks with my grandparents,” said Cerena Lee, whose grandfather Dutch Holthouse owned the ranch. “I remember riding around there in a pickup truck with my grandfather and seeing the family. The grandparents took care of the kids and gave mom and dad a break. The property was beautiful. The views were stunning. They had horses in the paddock and a prune orchard down on the flat area.”

Lee, who lives near Portland, Ore., now, said IBM used the land, which remains undeveloped, as a buffer area around its offices where its research scientists and other employees could get outside, hike and share ideas.

The tech industry has eyed other lands south of the IBM site in Coyote Valley, which for decades have been covered with row crops, farm stands, grazing cows and rural lots. In the 1980s, Apple eyed Coyote Valley as a place to build its world headquarters. In the 1990s, Cisco Systems tried to build a massive campus there.

Both plans were fought by environmental groups, who said the area should be left in its natural state. In recent years, San Jose leaders including former Mayor Sam Liccardo and current Mayor Matt Mahan have pushed for new development in downtown San Jose and in other already developed areas of the city, and urged that Coyote Valley be left in its natural state.

Over the past decade, the city of San Jose, open space agencies and land trusts have purchased roughly 10,000 acres in Coyote Valley and the surrounding hillsides for more than $100 million, ensuring its rural character will remain largely intact.

“We’ve protected much of the Coyote Valley floor, but if we don’t protect the hillsides that frame it we can’t protect the vision of wildlife corridors and landscape linkage,” said Andrea Mackenzie, general manager of the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority which runs several public open space preserves in the area. “And the views. The views from these hillsides speak a lot better than a thousand words.”

One longtime Santa Clara County resident remembers the area before the electronics industry boom of the 1950s turned Santa Clara County from the “Valley of Hearts Delight” into one of the world’s leading technology industry centers.

“I was born in Coyote. There were orchards all over and alfalfa fields,” said Yvonne Fields, 87, of Morgan Hill. “A lot of that stuff has disappeared.”

Fields, a rancher, rented the Holthouse property for years to run black angus and other breeds of beef cattle. She lamented how the once bucolic patchwork of rustic cattle ranches and orchards that made up Santa Clara County changed in many places to subdivisions, tech campuses and government-owned parks.

“I think that’s nice that the Holthouse property will remain undeveloped,” she said. “The Holthouses were nice people. My son runs cattle there now. But there are hardly any ranchers left in this area. Most of them are gone.”