Encinitas: Five Villages, One City

Encinitas takes its name from a Spanish land grant given to Andrés Ybarra in eighteen forty-two, Rancho Las Encinitas, meaning little oaks. But for most of its existence, Encinitas was not one place at all. It was five distinct communities: Old Encinitas, which Jabez Pitcher platted in eighteen eighty-one; Leucadia, named for a Greek island; Cardiff-by-the-Sea; and the German colony of Olivenhain, whose name translates to olive grove. Each had its own identity and its own reasons to resist being absorbed into the other.

For decades, residents worried that San Diego County's sprawling governance left them with no real say over what got built on their coastlines and hillsides. In October of nineteen eighty-six, sixty-nine percent of voters said yes to incorporation, fusing all five communities into a single city. The marriage, one local paper called it, was one of necessity. The little oaks had finally decided to stand together.