Terramonte

The city publishes Terramonte as a 31.6 acre polygon on its HOA Local register, holding 166 addresses. They sit on six streets, Talega, Sepulveda, Amantes and Charca among them. The published boundary follows lot lines and leaves the street rights of way outside it, so no centerline falls inside. The county parcel record inside the boundary is 171 parcels, predominantly detached single family houses. The median lot the county records here is 0.12 acres and 54 feet wide. The city general plan gives 23.2 of those acres a low density residential designation. The zoning layer puts 22.9 acres in the RL-6000 zone and 8.3 in OS. 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.

Terramonte puts earth and mountain together, and the streets carry on describing the ground. Charca is a pond, Roquedo a rocky outcrop, Sequero a dry place and Talega a long sack, the word that also names a whole valley over in San Clemente. Amantes means lovers, and Sepulveda is the outlier, a Californio family surname rather than a piece of landscape.

The 166 homes went up between 1990 and 1994, most of them in a single push in 1990, on about thirty two acres with a quarter of it left open. This is the southern side of the city, where addresses feed Arroyo Vista and Tesoro High rather than the Saddleback Valley schools that serve the north.