Tres Vistas

Tres Vistas covers 21.9 acres and records 65 addresses on 65 parcels with no unit designators, at a median lot of 0.176 acres, second only to Mission Ridge among the communities here laid out one home to a lot. Six streets run 0.62 miles inside the boundary: Bergantin, Chapala, Escuna, San Blas, San Valle and Tres. The general plan carries 20.6 acres at 3.5 to 6.5 homes an acre with 1.1 acres as recreation and open space.

The flood layer places 21.1 acres in zone X. Capistrano Unified serves the boundary, and the district's address locator returns Castille Elementary at 482 students, Fred Newhart Middle at 1,105 and Capistrano Valley High at 1,991 from every interior point tested.

Tres Vistas means three views, and the name is the whole point of the place. It is 65 homes spread across 21.9 acres, all of them laid out by a single recorded map: Tract 8770, filed with Orange County on 25 February 1977 and surveyed by Jack G. Raub, when this was still unincorporated county territory. The houses went up over the five years that followed, the first finished in 1977 and the last in 1981, with most of them completed in 1979 and 1980.

The street names are drawn from the sea and from the Mexican Pacific. A bergantin is a brigantine, square rigged on its foremast, and an escuna is a schooner, rigged fore and aft; San Blas is the old Spanish naval port on the coast of Nayarit from which ships were sent north to supply the California missions; and Chapala is the great lake in Jalisco.