Hidden Mountain Estates

Hidden Mountain Estates covers 48.81 acres and the city's address layer records just 36 addresses inside it, one for each numbered lot on the recorded map, on three named streets: Avenida La Mancha, Paseo Sagrado and Via Mambrino. All 0.63 miles of street inside the boundary appear on the city's Private Roads layer. Most of the land is held open rather than built on: the zoning layer carries 37.6 acres as Single-Family-20,000 and 11.1 acres as General Open Space, the General Plan carries 45.3 acres as Very Low Density, and the city's 200 foot ridgeline buffer crosses 7.66 acres. The boundary also takes in 0.42 miles of city trail and the terminus of the La Mancha Trail.

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, 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 48.8 acres of the boundary sit in the High fire hazard severity class.

Avenida La Mancha, Via Mambrino, Paseo Sagrado. The upper half of the Hidden Mountain hillside keeps the same Don Quixote street naming as its neighbor below, and Mambrino is the best of them: in the novel the helmet of Mambrino is really a barber's shaving basin, and Quixote wears it anyway. These are thirty-six houses on lots close to an acre, built from 1988 on the last piece of the ridge.

The ground itself was part of the great Forster holding and then of the ranch that Richard O'Neill Sr and James Flood bought from the Forster family in 1882. It ran cattle, then citrus, then nothing much, and the houses came last.