Marbella Crest

Marbella Crest covers 45.09 acres and the city's address layer records just 23 addresses inside it, on five named streets: Golden Ridge Lane, Golf Club Drive, Paseo Amore, Paseo Elegancia and Via Bella. All 0.4 miles of street inside the boundary appear on the city's Private Roads layer. The county puts the median parcel at 1.64 acres, the ninth largest of the fifty communities on the register, and the zoning layer carries 45.0 acres as Single-Family-40,000 with the General Plan holding the whole boundary as Very Low Density. The city's 200 foot ridgeline buffer crosses 7.29 acres.

Four tenths of a mile of city trail runs inside the boundary and the terminus of the Hunt Club Ridge Trail sits in 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 45.1 acres of the boundary in the High class.

Marbella Crest is the small, high piece of the Marbella development: twenty-three houses on lots averaging well over an acre, on the ridge above Golf Club Drive, built from 1989. Golden Ridge Lane runs into it from the Hunt Club side, which places these houses at the junction of the town's two big hillside projects of the late 1980s.

The course below was designed by Jay Morrish with Jack Nicklaus, and the whole development takes its name and its Mediterranean styling from the Spanish coast. Underneath that the ground is ranch. Don Juan Forster bought the ruined mission with James McKinley at public auction in 1845 for 710 dollars, built a holding of more than 200,000 acres out of Rancho Trabuco, Rancho La Paz and Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores, and after his death in 1882 the ranch went to James Flood and to Richard O'Neill Sr, who had come from Ireland and knew cattle.