Vera Cruz

Vera Cruz covers 33.1 acres and holds 115 addresses on 115 parcels, one for one, at a median parcel of 0.216 acres. Three streets serve the whole community: Riachuelo with 75 addresses, Llano with 27 and Cerca with 13. It is the 42nd largest of the fifty San Clemente communities mapped here by area and the 34th by address count.

Residential Low Density land accounts for 26.1 acres inside the boundary and the boundary lies wholly inside the Forster Ranch Specific Plan area, under the Forster Ranch master association. All 33.1 acres sit in the state's Moderate fire hazard severity class, the mildest of the three classes used in San Clemente, and only Flora Vista shares that across its whole boundary. Capistrano Unified's own school locator returned San Clemente High, Bernice Ayer Middle and Truman Benedict Elementary at all five interior points tested.

Vera Cruz was built by Bird Development between 1987 and 1989, at the tail end of the first wave of Forster Ranch construction. The homes are Spanish in style, from about 1,534 to 2,170 square feet, and they sit on lots of roughly 8,000 to 11,000 square feet. The layout is unusual for this part of town and obvious from the air, a single circular street with short cul de sacs turned inward off it, which is why the place feels sealed off from the roads around it. There are only three street names inside the loop, Cerca, Llano and Riachuelo, the last two meaning a flat plain and a small stream.

The name is one of the oldest in the Americas. Vera Cruz is the original spelling of Veracruz, from the Latin Vera Crux, the True Cross. Hernan Cortes reached the Gulf coast of Mexico on Good Friday, 22 April 1519, and founded Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz there, dedicating the place to the True Cross because of the day he landed. It was the first Spanish settlement on the mainland of the Americas to receive a coat of arms. San Clemente kept the older two word spelling both for this neighborhood and for Camino Vera Cruz, the Forster Ranch road that runs southeast of it.