Esslinger Building

San Juan Capistrano (Spanish for "St. John of Capistrano") is a city in Orange County, California, located along the Orange Coast. The population was 34,593 at the 2010 census. San Juan Capistrano was founded by the Spanish in 1776, when St. Junípero Serra established Mission San Juan Capistrano. Extensive damage caused by the 1812 Capistrano earthquake caused the community to decline. Following the Mexican secularization act of 1833, the mission village officially became a town and was briefly renamed as San Juan de Argüello. Following the American Conquest of California, San Juan remained a small, rural town until the 20th century; the restoration of the mission in the 1910–20s transformed the town into a tourist destination and a backdrop for Hollywood films.

The Richard Egan House, also known as Egan House or Judge Richard Egan House, is a historic home located in downtown San Juan Capistrano, California. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017.It was built by San Juan Capistrano contractor William English in 1883 for Richard Egan. It is the only Renaissance Revival-style house in San Juan Capistrano.It was designed and constructed by Richard Egan who later became the city's judge. Egan, born in Ireland and studied in New York fell in love with San Juan Capistrano and decided to settle down and build a home. The house is a one-story structure built originally built in 1883 but was destroyed by fire and the current home was rebuilt in 1898. It has classic Victorian Architecture with brick walls and a white wooden patio porch. The building once served as courtroom for the town until Egan's death in 1923. Since 2017, the building is home to Ellie's Table. The bakery is an independent breakfast restaurant with a few other locations within southern Orange County. Inside the building are many artifacts from the town's late 19th and early 20th century history. Outside the building, facing west, are three historical markers. One indicating the property is listed on the National Register, another indicating it is a San Juan Capistrano historic site, and one with a few paragraphs of information regarding Richard Egan and his home.

El Adobe de Capistrano, or El Adobe, is a restaurant located in at 31891 Camino Capistrano in San Juan Capistrano, California. It has been operated since 1948 and is in a building composed of two historic adobes near Mission San Juan Capistrano. It is also notable for being frequented by and being a favorite of U.S. President Richard Nixon who lived in nearby San Clemente. Now El Adobe is a California historical landmark.

The Los Rios Historic District is an historic district and neighborhood in the city of San Juan Capistrano, California. With buildings dating to 1794, it is the oldest continually occupied neighborhood in the state. The nearby Mission San Juan Capistrano was the first of the 21 California Missions to have Indians, soldiers and workers live outside the mission grounds. Three adobes remains in the Los Rios neighborhood itself, although there are a number of others close by which were part of what was once a larger neighborhood.The neighborhood originally had 40 adobe structures, but most were replaced in the 19th century by wooden board and batten structures. Thirty-one of the buildings on Los Rios Street and the surrounding area are listed on the National Register of Historic Places as of 1983.

San Juan Township is a defunct township in what was once part of Los Angeles County, California. It existed prior to the abolition of townships in California in the 1870s. It encompassed an area comprising several ranchos and the mission lands of Mission San Juan Capistrano in what is now southern Orange County. Census records report a population of 661 in 1860 and 445 in 1870.

Acjacheme ("a heap of animated things") was an Acjachemen village that was closely situated to the mother village of Putuidem in what is now San Juan Capistrano, California. The Spanish missionaries constructed Mission San Juan Capistrano less than 60 yards from the village in 1776. Acjachemen is a pluralization of the word Acjacheme, and became the moniker for the people overall after the mission period. The village has also been referred to as Akhachmai, Ahachmai, Akagchemem, Acágcheme, and Axatcme. The village site has been identified as being at an elementary school east of the Mission San Juan Capistrano by José de Grácia Cruz, who was one of the last native people born at the mission in the 1840s. Ahachmai has been referred to as a dialect or variety of the Acjachemen language and is used, although less commonly, to refer to the people as a whole.

Mission San Juan Capistrano (Spanish: Misión San Juan Capistrano) is a Spanish mission in San Juan Capistrano, Orange County, California. Founded November 1, 1776 in colonial Las Californias by Spanish Catholic missionaries of the Franciscan Order, it was named for Saint John of Capistrano. The Spanish Colonial Baroque style church was located in the Alta California province of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The Mission was founded less than 60 yards from the village of Acjacheme. The Mission was secularized by the Mexican government in 1833, and returned to the Roman Catholic Church by the United States government in 1865. The Mission was damaged over the years by a number of natural disasters, but restoration and renovation efforts date from around 1910. It functions today as a museum.

San Juan Capistrano station is a train station in San Juan Capistrano, California, United States served by Amtrak, the national railroad passenger system, and Metrolink, a commuter railroad. The station has a single side platform serving the single track of the SCRRA's Orange Subdivision.The station is served by Amtrak's Pacific Surfliner, and with few exceptions is the last stop in Orange County; a few trains stop at San Clemente Pier before crossing into San Diego County. It is also served by Metrolink's Orange County Line and Inland Empire-Orange County Line. Amtrak's ridership at the station dropped 53.4% to 90,699 in 2020, largely due to complications of the COVID-19 pandemic and two stay at home orders issued by California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Mission Basilica San Juan Capistrano is a Catholic parish in the Diocese of Orange in California. The parish church is located just northwest of Mission San Juan Capistrano in the city of San Juan Capistrano, California, United States. Completed in 1986, it was designated a minor basilica in 2000 and a national shrine in 2003. The parish sponsors a number of ministries, notably "Serra's Pantry", a registered food agency distributing food and hygiene supplies to several hundred local families, and the Mission Basilica School, a parochial school for children in grades pre-K through 8.

El Horno Creek or Horno Creek (Spanish: "Oven Creek") is a tributary stream of San Juan Creek in Orange County in the U.S. state of California. It is approximately 5.9 miles (9.5 km) long and drains an area of 4.3 square miles (11 km2). The creek joins San Juan Creek on the right bank, only a few hundred yards upstream of the Trabuco Creek confluence, within the city limits of San Juan Capistrano. The creek begins in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains (33.5672464°N 117.6300495°W / 33.5672464; -117.6300495), in the mostly residential CDP of Ladera Ranch. The headwaters of the creek were formerly divided into two canyons, but during the development of Ladera Ranch starting in the late 1990s the area was regraded, and the headwaters combined into a single 2.4-mile (3.9 km) channel. The creek flows southwest through a small flood control dam and into San Juan Capistrano, where it crosses under Interstate 5 and turns south, bisecting San Juan Elementary School. Shortly past the school the creek enters an underground concrete channel passing under the I-5/CA 74 interchange and flows into San Juan Creek at (33.4978044°N 117.6553283°W / 33.4978044; -117.6553283). Although significant stretches of the creek remain above ground, riparian habitat along the creek remains "sporadic" despite its perennial flow mainly due to pollution from stormwater.

The Frank A. Forster House in San Juan Capistrano, California is a 6,000-square-foot (560 m2) stucco, Spanish tile roofed mansion built in 1910 for $10,000 by Frank Ambrosio Foster, grandson of rancher John (Don Juan) Forster. It is the only remaining home of its style and era in the area. It was designed as a 5-bedroom, 1-bathroom home in the Mission Revival style by Los Angeles architects Robert Farquhar Train and Robert Edmund Williams (Train & Williams). Upon the deaths of Frank and his wife Ada, their daughter Alice Forster Leck inherited the house, and bequeathed it to her nephew Pancho Forster.The property changed owners in 1975, and was purchased as a fixer-upper in 1983 by interior designer Martha Gresham, who traded two Porterville ranches for the house. It came with a legend of a ghost, nicknamed "George the Ghost" by Gresham. She spent $350,000 restoring the mansion, and used it as a home and office until 1990 when she sold it to photographer Phillip Stewart Charis.The mansion is a San Juan Capistrano Historic and Cultural Landmark. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places listings in Orange County, California in 1986.

Arroyo Trabuco (known also as Trabuco Creek) is a 22-mile (35 km)-long stream in coastal southern California in the United States. Rising in a rugged canyon in the Santa Ana Mountains of Orange County, the creek flows west and southwest before emptying into San Juan Creek in the city of San Juan Capistrano. Arroyo Trabuco's watershed drains 54 square miles (140 km2) of hilly, semi-arid land and lies mostly in Orange County, with a small portion extending northward into Riverside County. The lower section of the creek flows through three incorporated cities and is moderately polluted by urban and agricultural runoff. Acjachemen and Payómkawichum people lived along the perennial stream in settlements and hunting camps for 8,000 years before the invasion of Spanish colonization. Villages along the creek included Alauna and Putiidhem. Trabuco is Spanish for a Blunderbuss, a type of shotgun. Local legend attributes a Franciscan missionary friar traveling with the Gaspar de Portolà Expedition in 1769 for the story that a blunderbuss was lost in the upper canyon by the creek, and so the naming of the area. John "Don Juan" Forster received a Mexican land grant in 1846 for the canyon lands and creek and established Rancho Trabuco here. In its natural state, Arroyo Trabuco supported one of the most significant steelhead trout runs in Orange County, and birds, large mammals, and amphibians still flourish in riparian zones along its undeveloped portions. Trabuco Canyon along upper Arroyo Trabuco, and long, narrow O'Neill Regional Park, formed from the original land grant of Rancho Trabuco in 1982, are popular off-roading, hiking, fishing and camping areas in the watershed.