Capistrano Villas #1

Capistrano Villas #1 covers 17.54 acres, the smallest of the fifty communities the City of San Juan Capistrano carries on its homeowner association register, and it holds 233 addresses, the ninth most. The address layer names five streets inside the boundary, Avenida De La Vista, Calle San Antonio, Calle San Diego, Oso Road and Paseo Carmel, and none of the 0.71 miles of street appears on the city's Private Roads layer, so the city maintains all of it. Zoning is Multiple-Family District across 16.9 acres with 0.7 acres in the Open Space Recreation District, and 0.46 acres of Rio Oso Park, at Avenida De La Vista and Oso, falls inside the boundary.

Four interior points were tested against the Capistrano Unified locator and all four returned the same three campuses, and the high school is not the one most of San Juan Capistrano attends. San Juan Elementary takes TK through fifth grade with 662 students, Marco Forster Middle enrolls 930, and Capistrano Valley High School in Mission Viejo enrolls 1,991 and graduated 95.9 percent of its class. The Fire Hazard Severity Zone layer splits the boundary between 11.5 acres of Moderate hazard and 6.1 acres of Non-Wildland Fuel.

Capistrano Villas went up beside the old heart of town from 1971, in the first building wave after incorporation in 1961. The ground here is as close to the beginning of California suburban life as any in the state. Mission San Juan Capistrano was founded in 1776 and was the first of the twenty-one missions to let Native Americans, soldiers and workers live outside the mission walls, and the street they lived on, Los Rios, has been lived on continuously ever since.

Around forty adobes once stood in that neighborhood. Most were replaced during the nineteenth century by board and batten wooden houses, three adobes remain, and thirty-one buildings on and around Los Rios Street were added to the National Register of Historic Places on 4 April 1983. The Montanez Adobe was built in 1794. The O'Neill Museum, run by the Historical Society, sits at the top of the street.