Homes, condos and land for sale and rent in San Juan Capistrano, CA

 
San Juan Capistrano is a city in Orange County, California, United States. The current OMB metropolitan designation for San Juan Capistrano and the Orange County Area is “Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine, CA.” The population was 34,593 at the 2010 census, up from 33,826 at the 2000 census. The city was created around Mission San Juan Capistrano, and many of the homes and strip malls resemble the Spanish architecture that composes the building. It is home to the widest variety of homes in Orange County, including those built prior to 1900, in its central district (some being adobes from the 18th century). San Juan Capistrano formerly hosted a population of cliff swallows that migrate each year from Argentina to the Mission San Juan Capistrano.
San Juan Capistrano is the site of a Catholic mission for which it is named, Mission San Juan Capistrano. When the Mission was founded in 1776, the region was populated by the Acjachemen band of Native Americans, called Juaneños by the Spanish. The mission was named after Giovanni da Capistrano (1386-1456), the Franciscan saint from Capestrano, in the Italian region of Abruzzo.
Giovanni da Capistrano, although raised to the sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church is documented by historical research by the Oxford University historian Norman Davies to have burnt to death more than 50 Jews in May 1453 in the Polish city of Wroclaw.
The city is the site of California’s oldest residential neighborhood, Los Rios. It is also the home of the oldest in use building in California, the Serra Chapel in the Mission. The area was the site of both the first vineyard and first winery in California.
In the 1830s Richard Henry Dana, Jr., author of the classic Two Years Before the Mast visited the area as a sailor engaged in the hide trade on board the ship Pilgrim. Describing the locale, which then included what is now the neighboring city of Dana Point, he gushed, “San Juan is the only romantic spot in California.” The area was also the locale of Johnston McCulley’s first Zorro novella, The Curse of Capistrano, published in 1919 (later renamed The Mark of Zorro after the success of the film of the same name).
The city is featured in a map entitled “Inferno” in Valve’s Counter-Strike series.
San Juan Capistrano is located in south Orange County and is bisected by Interstate 5. 33°29′58″N 117°39′42″W (33.499493, -117.661614).
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 14.3 square miles (37 km2). 14.1 square miles (37 km2) of it is land and 0.1 square miles (0.26 km2) of it (1.26%) is water.
The 2010 United States Census reported that San Juan Capistrano had a population of 34,593. The population density was 2,419.9 peo