Alicante

Alicante is drawn on the city's HOA Local register at 19.3 acres, with 133 addresses inside it. They sit on five streets, Calle del Norte, Calle del Sur, Via Empanada and Vista Sabana among them, carrying 0.66 miles of centerline. The county parcel record inside the boundary is 134 parcels, predominantly condominium units. The median lot the county records here is 0.14 acres. The city general plan gives 19.3 of those acres a low-medium density residential designation. The zoning layer puts 19.2 acres in the RLM-4000-A zone and 0.1 in OSG. Mail here carries the 92688 zip code and a Rancho Santa Margarita postal city.

The city assigns the ground to evacuation zone RSM09, which it describes as SFR, Elementary School, Church, Skate Park, HOA parks and pools. Water comes from the Santa Margarita Water District and trash is collected Friday by CR&R. All of it lies in Capistrano Unified, which feeds Arroyo Vista Elementary and Tesoro High.

Alicante sits on the Plano Trabuco, the high flat shelf of the old O'Neill cattle ranch that gave this whole city its ground. The plain got its name in July 1769, when a soldier with the Portola expedition lost his trabuco, his musket, somewhere out here, and the plain, the creek and the canyon have carried the word ever since. James Flood and Jerome O'Neill bought the combined ranchos in 1882 and ran cattle on them for a century. Nothing much changed until 1986, when the first homes in the new master planned community went on sale.

Alicante went up in the wave that followed, at the end of the 1980s, as one of the condominium villages on the south side of the plain. Its name comes off the Spanish map, like most names here: Alicante is a Mediterranean port in the Valencian Community, founded on a hill the Carthaginians called the White Mountain. The streets keep the theme without much fuss. Calle del Norte and Calle del Sur take their names from the compass, and Vista Frondosa, the leafy view, points at the planting that was put in with the buildings. SAMLARC, the master association that runs the lake and the pools, still lists Alicante among its sub associations.