Rancho San Juan (Lacouague)

Rancho San Juan, the part of it the city carries as Lacouague, covers 23.1 acres and the address layer records 61 addresses inside it, one for each numbered lot on the recorded map, across six named streets: Calle Posada, Paseo Bahia, Paseo Cadiz, Paseo Miraloma, Via Fajita and Via Los Arboles. All 0.61 miles of street inside the boundary appear on the city's Private Roads layer, and the recorded map also left the storm drain easements private and in the association's care. The whole boundary is zoned Planned Community District and the General Plan carries 20.1 acres as Very Low Density.

Two greenbelt parcels the city holds as parkway, 4.8 acres and 0.44 acres, sit inside the boundary, and 0.35 miles of city trail runs through it with both the head and the terminus of the Lacouague Trail. 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. All 23.1 acres of the boundary sit in the High fire hazard severity class.

Pierre Lacouague started an orange ranch on this ground in 1920, working 220 acres. His son Jean-Pierre was born on that ranch on 30 October 1923 and lived his whole life on it, leaving only for Fullerton Junior College and Santa Clara University and for the Army, where his engineering skills were put to building bridges in Europe during the Second World War. He married Marie Sansinena in the Serra Chapel at the Mission in June 1951, and together they raised four children, eight grandchildren and ninety acres of Valencia oranges. He gave the town more than twenty-five years in its volunteer fire department, kept the family's Basque ties all his life, and went back to the Basque country whenever he could.

He gave up the oranges in 1986. The pressure to sell the land for the houses going up around it, as he put it later, had become too severe to pass up, and he retired as one of the very last orange growers in Orange County. He kept five acres. The city adopted Comprehensive Development Plan 86-02, Rancho San Juan, as the planning document for this ground, and the houses here went up in 1989 and 1990. He died in 2008 at eighty-four.