La Mancha

La Mancha covers 58.1 acres and records 319 addresses on 319 parcels with no unit designators, at a median lot of 0.051 acres. Seventeen streets run 2.87 miles inside the boundary and the naming comes almost entirely from Cervantes: Dulcinea, Dorothea, Lucinda, Zoraida, Cardenio, Anselmo and Mambrino are characters from Don Quixote, El Toboso and Montiel are places in it, and La Roda, Manzanares, Azuer and Guadiana are towns and rivers of the real La Mancha. La Mancha Park sits inside the boundary at 26482 Country Club Drive, five acres of turf.

The general plan carries 56.3 acres at 3.5 to 6.5 homes an acre and 1.6 acres as recreation and open space, and the whole boundary lies in flood zone X. Capistrano Unified serves it, and the district's address locator returns Viejo Elementary at 447 students, Fred Newhart Middle at 1,105 and Capistrano Valley High at 1,991 from every interior point tested.

La Mancha is named for the dry plateau in central Spain where Cervantes set Don Quixote, and the developer carried the joke all the way down to the street signs. Of the seventeen streets inside the boundary, most are lifted straight out of the novel: Dulcinea is the knight's imagined lady, El Toboso is the village she came from, Cardenio, Lucinda, Dorothea, Anselmo and Zoraida are characters from the interleaved tales, Mambrino is the barber whose basin Quixote wore as a golden helmet, and Montiel is the plain he first rode out onto. Manzanares, Guadiana, La Roda and Azuer are rivers and towns of the real La Mancha.

The ground was Rancho Mission Viejo, the O'Neill family cattle holding. The family and its partners formed the Mission Viejo Company in 1963, the first residents arrived in 1966, and Donald Bren shaped the early plan around Spanish architecture, which is the reason a Spanish literary conceit sits so comfortably here. La Mancha covers 58.1 acres with 319 homes, and it went up as the south end of the city filled in during the 1980s.