Capistrano Royale

Capistrano Royale covers 193.24 acres, the third largest of the fifty communities the City of San Juan Capistrano carries on its homeowner association register, and only 124 addresses sit on it across ten named streets. Most of the ground is not built on at all: the General Plan carries 100.6 acres as Very Low Density and 51.5 acres as General Open Space, the zoning layer holds 53.9 acres as General Open Space and puts another 35.3 acres in the Residential and Agricultural District, and 51.19 acres fall inside the city's ridgeline buffer. The boundary takes in 2.7 miles of city trail, more than any other community on the register, with the head and the terminus of the Trabuco Ridge Trail and the head of the Highland Trail all inside it. Of the 2.63 miles of street, only 0.38 miles is private, because Highland Drive, Monarch Drive, Dominion Way and Windsor Drive were dedicated to the city on the recorded maps.

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, 53 percent meeting the state standard in English language arts and 59 percent in mathematics, and it feeds Marco Forster Middle, which enrolls 930. San Juan Hills High School enrolls 2,641 and graduated 96.2 percent of its class. All 193.2 acres sit in the High fire hazard severity class, and the city's own property layer holds four sites inside the boundary, among them the Capistrano Royale Pump Station and Terminal Reservoirs 1 and 2.

Capistrano Royale sits high on the north-east hills above the valley, and its streets are a small joke about the name: Buckingham, Berkshire, Imperial, Monarch, Dominion, an English court dropped into a Spanish town. The hillside itself came out of the largest single owner ranch in southern California. Don Juan Forster, an Englishman who married into the Pico family, bought the ruined mission with James McKinley at auction in 1845 for 710 dollars and lived in the friars' quarters until 1864. Abraham Lincoln returned the mission to the Catholic Church in 1865.

Building on hills like this is the reason San Juan Capistrano fights about ridgelines. The city wrote preservation and density limits into its general plan in 1974, and the large-lot hillside neighborhoods that followed from 1980 onward, this one among them, were shaped by that argument as much as by the view.