Malaspina

Malaspina covers 39.89 acres and carries twelve addresses, fewer than any other community on the city's homeowner association register, on three named streets: Malaspina Road, Paseo Atrevida and Paseo Cardero. All 0.41 miles of street inside the boundary are private and the register records the association as resident managed. The county parcel layer puts the median parcel here at 2.5 acres, the eighth largest of the fifty. Zoning matches that scale, 31.9 acres in the Residential and Agricultural District where horsekeeping is permitted and 7.9 acres in General Open Space, and the General Plan carries the same split as Very Low Density and General Open Space.

The city's 200 foot ridgeline buffer crosses 2.6 acres of the boundary and the terminus of the Mission Hills Trail sits inside it. Four interior points were tested against the Capistrano Unified locator and all four returned the same three campuses: Harold Ambuehl Elementary for TK through fifth grade with 324 students, Marco Forster Middle at 930, and San Juan Hills High School at 2,641, which graduated 96.2 percent of its class. The Fire Hazard Severity Zone layer places all 39.9 acres of the boundary in the High class.

Twelve houses on lots averaging two and a half acres, on a road called Malaspina, off Paseo Atrevida and Paseo Cardero. Those three names come from the same voyage. Alejandro Malaspina was an Italian-born Spanish naval officer who commanded a five year scientific expedition from 1789 to 1794 in two purpose-built corvettes, the Descubierta under Malaspina himself and the Atrevida under Jose de Bustamante y Guerra. Jose Cardero was one of the artists who sailed with them and drew the people and places they met. The ships worked their way down from Alaska and stopped at the Spanish settlement and mission at Monterey before returning to Mexico.

The first houses here went up in 1976 and the last in 2001, in the hills where the town's ranch land used to run. This is the far edge of what Don Juan Forster once held: he and James McKinley bought the ruined mission at auction in 1845 for 710 dollars, and the ranch that grew out of it passed in 1882 to James Flood and his manager Richard O'Neill Sr.