Rancho San Juan (Whispering Hills)

Whispering Hills covers 93.86 acres, the ninth largest of the fifty communities on the city's homeowner association register, and the address layer records 142 addresses inside it on eleven named streets that all borrow from the map of Spain: Paseo Aragon, Paseo Carmona, Paseo Navarra, Paseo Palmar, Paseo Paterna, Paseo Sedano, Paseo Tarazona, Via Granada, Via Pamplona, Via Salamanca and Via Zamora. All 2.05 miles of street inside the boundary appear on the city's Private Roads layer. The whole boundary is zoned Planned Community District, and the General Plan carries 89.9 acres under the same designation with 3.9 acres as General Open Space, while the city's 200 foot ridgeline buffer crosses 3.95 acres.

Four interior points were tested against the Capistrano Unified locator and all four returned the same three campuses. Harold Ambuehl Elementary takes TK through fifth grade with 324 students at a 23 to 1 ratio, 53 percent meeting the state standard in English language arts and 59 percent in mathematics, and it feeds Marco Forster Middle, which enrolls 930. San Juan Hills High School enrolls 2,641 and graduated 96.2 percent of its class. All 93.9 acres of the boundary sit in the High fire hazard severity class, and the recorded map carries the owners' own declaration to the same effect.

Whispering Hills began as a far bigger project than the one that got built. The first plan for this hillside on the east side of town, west of La Pata Avenue, proposed 356 homes. A resident named Mark Nielsen objected, neighbors formed a group around him called Citizens Against Uncontrolled San Juan Expansion, and the argument over how densely the edge of the city should be built ran for years. What the council finally approved, in 2004, was 155 single family homes on a 360 acre property with more than 200 acres left as open space, and in 2006 it gave the developer the go ahead to start building.

The houses here were finally built between 2011 and 2015. The trails that run out of the neighborhood into the canyons are part of the public riding network the city has kept through the valley, the main trails usually twenty feet wide and maintained by the city, the feeder trails narrower and looked after by the associations they serve.