Hidden Mountain

Hidden Mountain covers 27.06 acres and the city's address layer records 70 addresses on 70 parcels, one for one, across eight named streets that all come out of the same book: Paseo Aldonza, Paseo Andante, Paseo Isabella, Via Cervantes, Via Cruzada, Via Dulcinea, Via Fernando and Via Quixote. All 0.77 miles of street inside the boundary appear on the city's Private Roads layer, so the association maintains them rather than the city. Zoning runs across three lot sizes, 16.6 acres of Single-Family-10,000, 9.2 acres of Single-Family-20,000 and 1.2 acres of Single-Family-40,000, and the city's 200 foot ridgeline buffer crosses 1.48 acres of the site. The Hidden Mountain Pump Station sits inside the boundary on city record.

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. The Fire Hazard Severity Zone layer splits the boundary between 17.0 acres of High hazard, 5.5 acres of Non-Wildland Fuel and 4.5 acres of Moderate.

Read the street signs at Hidden Mountain and you are reading Don Quixote. Via Dulcinea is the knight's imagined lady, Paseo Aldonza is the farm girl she really was, Via Cervantes is the author, and up the hill in the next enclave you get Avenida La Mancha and Via Mambrino, the barber's basin Quixote wore as a golden helmet. Somebody laying out this hillside in the early 1980s picked a theme and stayed with it.

The homes were built between 1983 and 1988, on lots of about a quarter acre. The city's 1974 general plan set out to preserve ridgelines and historic resources, limit density and hold open space, and the hillside neighborhoods that came after it were built low, wide and in Spanish.