Capistrano Pointe

Capistrano Pointe covers 19.18 acres, the second smallest boundary on the city's homeowner association register, and it holds 316 addresses, the fifth most of the fifty. That density is the whole character of the place: 258 of those addresses carry a unit designator on the city record, and the two named streets inside the boundary, Camino De Vista and Paseo Del Mar, run to 0.54 miles, every foot of it on the city's Private Roads layer and maintained by the association. Zoning is Multiple-Family District across 19.1 acres and the General Plan carries 19.2 acres as High Density, the city's most intensive residential designation on this ground.

Four interior points were tested against the Capistrano Unified locator and all four returned the same three campuses, and the middle school is not the one most of the city attends. Palisades Elementary takes TK through fifth grade with 332 students, 58 percent meeting the state standard in English language arts and 57 percent in mathematics, and it feeds Shorecliffs Middle School in San Clemente, which enrolls 634. San Juan Hills High School enrolls 2,641 and graduated 96.2 percent of its class. The Fire Hazard Severity Zone layer places all 19.2 acres in the High class.

Capistrano Pointe stands on the south side of San Juan Creek, on the most southerly Mexican land grant in Orange County. Rancho Boca de la Playa took in 6,607 acres and was given in 1846 by Governor Pio Pico to Emigdio Vejar, born in Los Angeles in 1810. The name means the mouth of the beach, for the wetland where the creek meets the sea, and the grant ran from San Juan Creek south along the coast into what is now San Clemente.

By 1906 Cornelio Echenique had sold the rancho to the Goldschmidt brothers, who later sold land to Ole Hanson to build San Clemente. The bluffs and mesas above Paseo del Mar stayed open a long while after that, and the condominiums on Camino de Vista are one of the pieces of it that the town filled in during its suburban decades.