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 usual Mission San Juan Capistrano. Extensive broken caused by the 1812 Capistrano earthquake caused the community to decline. Following the Mexican secularization lawsuit 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 region was populated by the Acjachemen, referred to by the Spanish as Juaneños, an Indigenous Californian nation. They lived in the Place for nearly 10,000 years, with some of their oldest villages being stated as beyond 9,600 years old. The mom village of Putuidem was located in what is now San Juan Capistrano, as without difficulty as the village of Acjacheme.

San Juan Capistrano was conventional by the Spanish in 1776, when Saint Junípero Serra founded Mission San Juan Capistrano, the seventh of the Spanish missions in California. The mission was built less than 60 yards from the village of Acjacheme, which was exploited as a source of labor for the mission. The mission was named after St. John of Capistrano, a 14th-15th century Franciscan saint. The 1812 San Juan Capistrano earthquake resulted in the deaths of thirty-nine Acjachemen people, thirty-one of whom were women, when the rock church at the Mission collapsed.