Marbella

Marbella covers 298.88 acres, the largest of the fifty communities the City of San Juan Capistrano carries on its homeowner association register, and it is laid out around a private eighteen hole golf course. The city's address layer records 280 addresses on fourteen named streets, and all 3.65 miles of street inside the boundary also appear on the city's Private Roads layer, so the association maintains them rather than the city. The adopted plan sets the course at 136 acres, adds an eight acre clubhouse and racquet club complex, and holds roughly 92 acres as Natural Open Space, which is why 136.5 acres inside the boundary carry the General Plan designation Open Space Recreation and a further 62.9 acres carry General Open Space.

The boundary also takes in 1.36 miles of city trail, the fourth most of the fifty, with the trail heads for Helicopter Hill, Goldenridge and Malaspina inside it, and Helicopter Hill itself is 48.4 acres of city owned land. Four interior points tested against the Capistrano Unified locator returned the same three campuses, so the assignment holds across the whole boundary: Harold Ambuehl Elementary for TK through fifth grade, Marco Forster Middle, and San Juan Hills High, which graduated 96.2 percent of its class.

Marbella was laid out around a golf course in the rolling hills either side of Rancho Viejo Road, with the first homes finished in 1989. The course was designed by Jay Morrish with Jack Nicklaus, and the club has always sold itself as Mediterranean, which is why the streets read Via Andalusia and Marbella Vista and the whole thing is named for a town on the Spanish coast.

The hills it occupies were ranch land, part of the country that Don Juan Forster assembled in the middle of the nineteenth century. Forster and James McKinley bought the ruined mission at auction in 1845 for 710 dollars, and Forster went on to hold Rancho Trabuco, Rancho La Paz and Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores, more than 200,000 acres in all, the largest landholding in California. The United States patented 46,432 acres to him in 1866. After his death in 1882 the family sold to James Flood, whose ranch manager Richard O'Neill Sr became half owner, and the O'Neill family holds about 23,000 acres of it to this day.