Del Cabo

Del Cabo covers 66 acres and holds 50 addresses, the smallest address count of the fifty San Clemente communities mapped here even though the boundary itself is the 17th largest. The reason is in the land use split: 37.9 acres inside the line are private open space against 28 acres of Residential Low Density. Three streets serve it, Del Cabo with 25 addresses, Terramar with 14 and Arista with 11.

The whole boundary lies inside the Forster Ranch Specific Plan area. The state fire hazard severity map places 49.8 acres in its Very High class and 16.2 in High, and Del Cabo is the only Forster Ranch neighborhood the state maps into Very High at all. Capistrano Unified's own school locator returned San Clemente High, Bernice Ayer Middle and Truman Benedict Elementary at all five interior points tested.

Del Cabo is fifty houses on three streets, Arista, Del Cabo and Terramar, and it belongs to the first wave of Forster Ranch rather than the later one. It sits in the section the city called the Development Area, which the ranch's original developer, Estrella Properties, laid out and put into phases, and building across it was virtually complete by 1994. The fifty homes were platted as detached condominiums, which is why the city still carries the ground under them as a single holding, and 34 acres of natural open space is held alongside them and cannot be built on.

Walk northwest from Del Cabo and you are on the old La Cristianita Pageant grounds, roughly sixty acres the city still shows as open space, where San Clemente once staged an annual pageant commemorating the first Christian baptism in Alta California. Padre Francisco Gomez of the Portola expedition performed it in 1769 near a spring in the canyon south of town, and the place has been Los Cristianitos, the canyon of the little Christians, ever since. California made the site a state historical landmark in 1956, and a second marker anyone can visit stands at Casa Romantica on Avenida Granada.