Trabuco Highlands

Trabuco Highlands covers 424.0 acres on the city's own HOA Master register, and the city address layer records 800 addresses inside that line. They sit on 41 streets, Shadow Rock Lane, Porter Ranch Road, Briarwood Lane and Brookseed Drive among them, carrying 0.1 miles of centerline. The county parcel record inside the boundary is 882 parcels, predominantly detached single family houses. The median lot the county records here is 0.16 acres and 60 feet wide. The city general plan gives 264.1 of those acres an open space designation. The zoning layer puts 263.5 acres in the OS zone and 138.3 in RL-6000. Mail here carries the 92679 zip code and a Rancho Santa Margarita postal city.

The city general plan books 21.4 acres of parkland to Trabuco Highlands at one site, Central Park. The city amenity table lists organized sports fields, a basketball court, a children's play area, picnic tables and a swimming pool at Central Park. Central Park provides an indoor soccer arena. 394.3 acres are rated Very High on the 2025 state fire hazard severity map the city publishes. The city assigns the ground to evacuation zone RSM03, which it describes as Robinson Ranch HOA, Trabuco Highlands HOA, Trabuco Highland Apartment Complex. Water comes from the Trabuco Canyon Water District and trash is collected Tuesday by CR&R. All of it lies in Saddleback Valley Unified, which feeds Robinson Elementary, Rancho Santa Margarita Intermediate and Mission Viejo High.

In a city where nearly every street is Spanish, the streets here are English and rural. Shadow Rock, Briarwood, Brookseed, Silvertree, Raintree, Birdhollow, Deerhollow, Meander, Sugarbush, Larkgrove, Windstream, Pinebluff, Feather Grass, Huntknoll and Oakridge belong to a different vocabulary altogether, and Porter Ranch Road, Robinson Ranch Road, Mill Stream Road and Heritage Drive tie the whole thing to the working ranch next door rather than to the planned town below.

This is the Plano Trabuco, the flat above the canyon. Grain was dry farmed across the Trabuco Mesa from the 1890s into the 1920s, and from 1943 the Marines used the lower end of the mesa as a practice bombing range for pilots out of El Toro, keeping it until at least 1955. The 800 homes here went up between 1987 and 1995, and Trabuco Highlands was one of the six separate communities that voted in 1999 to incorporate together as the City of Rancho Santa Margarita on 1 January 2000.