Old San Juan

Old San Juan covers 38.39 acres and the city's address layer records 32 addresses inside it, all of them on one street, Old San Juan Road. Of the 0.81 miles of street clipped to the boundary, 0.57 miles are on the city's Private Roads layer, and the recorded map treated Old San Juan Road as a private right of way with only emergency and public security access granted to the city. Zoning is Single-Family-20,000 across 34.4 acres with 2.7 acres of Residential Garden-7,000 and 1.3 acres of General Open Space, and the General Plan carries 34.2 acres as Low Density. The boundary takes in 0.63 miles of city trail, the ninth most of the fifty communities on the register, and 1.37 acres of it is creek.

This is one boundary where the elementary assignment splits. Four interior points were tested against the Capistrano Unified locator: three returned San Juan Elementary and one returned Kinoshita Elementary, while all four returned Marco Forster Middle and San Juan Hills High School. San Juan Elementary enrolls 662 and Kinoshita 302, Marco Forster enrolls 930 and San Juan Hills 2,641, which graduated 96.2 percent of its class. The fire layer places 34.7 acres of the boundary in the High class, and the flood layer places 2.3 acres in Zone A.

Old San Juan Road is a private drive of thirty-two large houses built in 1999 and 2000. The name points at the town rather than the road: this is new construction that borrowed the identity of the settlement that grew up around the mission, which calls itself the birthplace of Orange County.

The old town was also, for a long stretch, a Basque town. In 1880 Domingo Oyharzabal and Juan Salaberri began buying property in and around downtown, including the Domingo Yorba adobe of 1830 and the Casa Manuel Garcia of 1840, which still stand side by side on Camino Capistrano and are on the National Register. The two-story Garcia adobe was the French Hotel from 1880 until 1903, and the general store on its ground floor outlasted the hotel by decades.