Cabo Vista

Cabo Vista is drawn on the city's HOA Local register at 13.7 acres, with 204 addresses inside it. They sit on four streets, Camino del Oro, Paseo del Sol, Via Madera and Paseo Estrellas, carrying 0.78 miles of centerline. The county parcel record inside the boundary is 226 parcels, predominantly condominium units. The median lot the county records here is 0.03 acres and 27 feet wide. The city general plan gives 7.6 of those acres a medium density residential designation. The zoning layer puts 8.1 acres in the RM-2000-A zone and 2.3 in OS. Mail here carries the 92688 zip code and a Rancho Santa Margarita postal city.

The city assigns the ground to evacuation zone RSM07, which it describes as SFR, HOA Park and Pools. All of it lies in Saddleback Valley Unified, which feeds Melinda Heights Elementary, Rancho Santa Margarita Intermediate and Trabuco Hills High.

Cabo Vista was built at the turn of the 1990s, in the stretch when Rancho Santa Margarita went from a set of model homes to a real town. Hughes Aircraft had opened a microelectronics plant on the plain in 1988, the parkway extensions that finally tied this corner to the rest of Orange County were finished in 1992, and the ground itself had been O'Neill ranch land, the same land James Flood and Jerome O'Neill bought in 1882 and the same plain a Portola soldier lost his musket on in 1769.

The four streets inside it are the whole naming idea in miniature: Camino del Oro, the road of gold, Paseo del Sol, the walk of the sun, Paseo Estrellas for the stars and Via Madera for the wood. Sun, gold, stars and timber on fourteen acres of attached homes. Cabo Vista is one of the sub associations SAMLARC lists under the master association, which is what puts the Lago Santa Margarita and its Beach Club on the amenity list for a small condominium community with no lake of its own.