Portola Center North

Portola Center North covers 19.9 acres and holds 82 homes on three streets, the second smallest home count of the fifty Lake Forest communities on this site. The median lot measures 6,813 square feet, larger than the medians at Parkside or Portola Center South, the other Lake Forest communities on this site platted in the same decade. The Coyote Brush Road trail runs through it on the city's trail map.

The city's pool layer records five backyard pools inside the boundary, four spas and a playground, with no shared pool. El Toro Water District supplies the water, street sweeping runs Friday in the small hours, and addresses carry both the 92630 and 92679 ZIP codes. Children go to Del Cerro Elementary, Los Alisos Intermediate and Mission Viejo High.

The Portola in the name is Gaspar de Portola, the first Spanish explorer to travel California by land, whose 1769 expedition passed through this vicinity more than seventy years before anybody held title to the ground. Title came in 1842, when Governor Alvarado granted Rancho Canada de los Alisos, 10,668 acres, to Jose Antonio Serrano, with Pio Pico enlarging it in 1846.

Serrano's cattle died in the drought that began in 1863 and the rancho passed to a Los Angeles banker. Dwight Whiting of Boston bought most of it in 1884 and planted olives, grape vines and roughly 400 acres of eucalyptus near Serrano Creek in a farming venture that failed. His name survives on the 2,500 acre wilderness park in the hills above here, and his trees survive as the forest half of the city's name, the lakes having been dug by Occidental Petroleum in the late 1960s. Portola Hills itself stayed outside the city until residents voted in 2000 to annex it and Foothill Ranch.