Los Olivos

Los Olivos is Planning Area 39 in the City of Irvine's own numbering, and the city's village polygon and its planning area polygon cover exactly the same ground. A city resolution writes the edges as the San Diego Freeway on the north, Irvine Center Drive on the east, Bake Parkway on the south, and San Diego Creek with Lake Forest Drive on the west. The General Plan gives the planning area 396 acres in two categories only, 252 of Medium-High Residential and 144 of Preservation, so there is no low-density pocket anywhere in the village. The city's address record holds 4,696 residential addresses on eighteen streets inside it, and the split between them is the thing to understand first: 4,445 sit on parcels the city classifies Apartment and 251 sit in the two tracts built for sale. Barcelona is 169 homes on 22.57 acres and carries the only association the city maps here, Barcelona Community Assn. under Crummack Huseby Property Management. Andalucia is 82 detached homes behind gates by California Pacific Homes, three plans of roughly 1,326 to 1,752 square feet, with a private recreation area called Seville Park.

The public half of the village is one park and the retail along its northern edge. Los Olivos Community Park at 101 Alfonso runs about 12.5 acres, opens 6 a.m. and closes 10 p.m., and holds the Los Olivos Community Center along with a lighted baseball field, a lighted soccer field, a lighted basketball court, three lighted tennis courts, three lighted pickleball courts, two lighted badminton courts, a musical-themed children's play area, trail access, ten barbecues and two picnic shelters. The city has twice found in writing that this one park meets the community's needs and that no further neighborhood park dedication is required in Planning Area 39. Los Olivos Marketplace opened on 19 March 2016 in the 8600 block of Irvine Center Drive anchored by Whole Foods Market, and a smaller property at 350 Gitano adds 3,744 square feet of leasable space inside the village itself. No school stands inside the boundary: Irvine Unified assigns the village to Alderwood Elementary, then Rancho San Joaquin Middle and University High.

For most of living memory this was not a neighborhood at all. Lion Country Safari opened on this ground in 1970, a 140-acre drive-through animal park where visitors took their own cars along four miles of road past lions, elephants, giraffes and rhinos, and it drew more than a million people in its first year. Its star was Frasier, an eighteen-year-old, toothless, arthritic lion who arrived from a Mexican circus in 1970 and went on to father thirty-five cubs before dying of pneumonia in July 1972. He got a feature film in 1973 and a burial on the grounds with members of the Scottish clan Fraser in attendance. In 1978 a pregnant hippopotamus named Bubbles escaped, evaded capture for nineteen days in a drainage ditch and died during the attempt to tranquilize her. The park closed in 1984. Wild Rivers water park opened on the same land at 8770 Irvine Center Drive in July 1986 and ran until September 2011, and beside it Irvine Meadows Amphitheater opened on 21 August 1981 with about 16,000 seats, spent most of the 2000s as the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, and played its last show, Gwen Stefani, on 30 October 2016 before the demolition crews arrived that November.

The Irvine Company then built the village on that cleared ground in stages. The apartments came first, roughly 1,750 homes on the old water park site, addressed at 350 Gitano and walked to the Spectrum. Los Olivos Marketplace opened on 19 March 2016 in the 8600 block of Irvine Center Drive behind a Whole Foods. Barcelona, 169 single-family homes for sale, opened in 2018 and sold out in the middle of 2021, and California Pacific Homes built Andalucia as 82 detached homes behind a gate. The 12.5-acre Los Olivos Community Park at 101 Alfonso sits in the middle of it. And still on the property, on a fence facing the tree he is buried under, a bronze plaque marks Frasier.