Pines Park: Hint of North Coast

If you are a painfully parochial native Southern Californian, you may not think that Pines Park in Capistrano Beach has the most gorgeous ocean view of any spot along the Orange County coast.

If, however, you have managed to dislodge yourself from Lotus Land a time or two and pay a visit to Northern California--where the seaside vistas offer a greener sort of majesty--then it may take a court order to keep you away from Pines Park.

Located at the corner of Camino Capistrano and Doheny Place, the park is 4 acres of crescent-shaped bliss, where all the park benches face the same direction. After all, who would want to stare at the houses across the street--handsome though they are--when one of the most unadulterated ocean views in the county is only a 180-degree turn away?

At the forward-most points of the park (it sits atop a bluff above Coast Highway), visitors can see an ocean panorama extending from southern San Clemente on the left to Dana Point Harbor on the right. And on a clear day, the sea is azure and is likely to be dotted with several white sails.

This in itself wouldn’t be so unusual for Southern California. However, at most points in the park, the view is haloed in several varieties of pines--Monterey, Aleppo, bull, stone--giving the whole vista a decidedly northern look.

In a part of the state where beach views are associated with the browns and tans of sand and scrub and palm trees, Pines Park is a kind of oasis of deep green. The lawns are thick and lush and the trees are an even deeper green, with pine cones clustered in their branches.

And the contrast between blue sky and ocean is almost startling.

Parts of the multilevel park are landscaped with flowers and shrubs, and there is a small play area for children with picnic tables nearby.

Not surprisingly, the park is frequently used for outdoor weddings, said Dave Lewis, the administrator of the Capistrano Bay Park and Recreation District. There are few weekends that pass without some couple tying the knot amid the pines and the sea breezes.

“It’s one of the park’s major functions,” said Lewis. “If it’s a weekend, it must be weddings.”

Until the early 1970s, said Lewis, Pines Park had been privately owned land for nearly 50 years and, though beautiful, was untended and overgrown.

“Our district wanted to see it in its natural state, though,” he said, and title was eventually granted to the district.

“What most people seem to think about the place,” said Lewis, “is that it’s an old-fashioned kind of setting. People say it’s like parks they used to visit when they were children.

“A comment we get a lot is ‘They don’t build them like that anymore.’ ”