El Caserio II

The city publishes El Caserio II as a 14.6 acre polygon on its HOA Local register, holding 151 addresses. They sit on six streets, Dewberry, Desert Thorn, Crucillo and Firethorn among them. The published boundary follows lot lines and leaves the street rights of way outside it, so no centerline falls inside. The county parcel record inside the boundary is 155 parcels, predominantly detached single family houses. The median lot the county records here is 0.08 acres and 40 feet wide. The city general plan gives 13.6 of those acres a medium density residential designation. The zoning layer puts 13.5 acres in the RLM-4000-D zone and 0.9 in OS. Mail here carries the 92688 zip code and a Rancho Santa Margarita postal city.

7.3 acres are rated Very High on the 2025 state fire hazard severity map the city publishes. The city assigns the ground to evacuation zone RSM04, which it describes as El Camino Montana Corridor, Church Row, St. John's School, Trabuco Mesa Elementary School, Trabuco Mesa Park. Water comes from the Santa Margarita Water District and trash is collected Thursday by CR&R. All of it lies in Saddleback Valley Unified, which feeds Trabuco Mesa Elementary, Rancho Santa Margarita Intermediate and Trabuco Hills High.

El Caserio means the hamlet, the small cluster of farm buildings that used to sit alone on a plain, and the name is a fair description of what this ground was for most of its history. The Plano Trabuco was ranch land under James Flood and Jerome O'Neill from 1882, worked from a handful of scattered buildings, and the city's own history says the area stayed fairly remote until 1986. El Caserio II dates to 1987, which makes it one of the first neighborhoods in the city.

The streets are a chaparral plant list rather than a Spanish one: Dewberry, Snowberry, Firethorn, Boxthorn, Desert Thorn and Crucillo. Four of the six are thorny shrubs, and crucillo is the Spanish name for a spiny native buckthorn. It reads as a deliberate nod to what was growing here before the graders arrived, on a plain that the Acjachemen had used long before the ranch, with their village of Alume standing between Trabuco Creek and Tijeras Creek.