Campanilla

Campanilla covers 24.55 acres reached from Via Entrada, and the city's address layer records 132 addresses on two named streets, Camino Del Rio and Via Del Mar. All 0.64 miles of street inside the boundary appear on the city's Private Roads layer, so the association maintains them rather than the city, and the recorded map relinquished vehicular access rights to Via Entrada everywhere except at those private street intersections. The whole boundary is zoned Planned Community District, 24.6 acres of it, and the General Plan carries 24.5 acres as Medium Density.

Four interior points were tested against the Capistrano Unified locator and all four returned the same three campuses. Harold Ambuehl Elementary takes TK through fifth grade with 324 students at a 23 to 1 ratio, and 53 percent met the state standard in English language arts and 59 percent in mathematics. Marco Forster Middle enrolls 930 and San Juan Hills High School enrolls 2,641 and graduated 96.2 percent of its class. The Fire Hazard Severity Zone layer places all 24.6 acres of the boundary in the High class, which carries its own construction and vegetation clearance requirements.

Campanilla is Spanish for a small bell, and in this town that word points at one thing. Mission San Juan Capistrano was founded on 1 November 1776 as the seventh of the California missions, and after the earthquake of 1812 destroyed the Great Stone Church and its 120 foot bell tower, a brick wall was raised in 1813 to hang the four bells that had been pulled from the rubble. That campanario is the picture on every postcard of the town, and the reason a hillside neighborhood two miles from it is named for a bell.

The houses came late. Campanilla was built out in 2012 to 2014 behind a gate off Camino del Rio, on a hillside governed by the general plan the city's citizens adopted in 1974. That plan preserved historic resources and open space, limited development density and provided for ridgeline preservation, which is why a neighborhood finished in the 2010s sits below the ridge instead of on it.