US Map / Cities / Irvine

Irvine Map

Irvine was drawn on paper before it was built — a single ranch of some 93,000 acres turned into a city of villages in southern Orange County.

Where is Irvine?

Irvine occupies the middle of Orange County, California, its southwestern corner about five miles from the beaches at Newport and its street grid some 40 miles down the coast from downtown Los Angeles. Santa Ana adjoins it on the northwest and Anaheim is about 13 miles north; Long Beach is some 30 miles northwest and San Diego about 85 miles south down the coast. On a regional map Irvine reads as another Los Angeles suburb, but it is a job center in its own right, and the commute into it from the Inland Empire runs in the opposite direction to the stereotype.

Irvine at a glance

Irvine in California

Irvine is the third of Orange County's three cities in the national top 100, after Anaheim and Santa Ana, and it is the newest by a wide margin — the city incorporated in 1971 around a campus of the University of California that had opened six years before. The land was the Irvine Ranch, a single nineteenth-century holding, and because one owner controlled all of it the city could be laid out in advance as a set of self-contained villages, each with its own school and shopping center, rather than growing by piecemeal subdivision. The California county map shows how densely Orange County is packed, and the California state page covers the state.

Ranch land, hills and Newport Bay

Irvine sits on the coastal plain at the foot of the Santa Ana Mountains, which rise steeply along its northeastern edge, with the lower San Joaquin Hills between the city and the ocean to the southwest. San Diego Creek drains the flat middle of the city and empties into Upper Newport Bay, a tidal estuary and one of the few substantial coastal wetlands left in Southern California — the Pacific coast page explains why sheltered inlets are so scarce on this shore. Much of the old ranch was never built on: the Irvine Ranch Natural Landmarks preserve tens of thousands of acres of canyon and coastal sage scrub in and around the city. The closed Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, which occupied a large block in the middle of Irvine until 1999, is now being rebuilt as the Orange County Great Park.

Cities near Irvine

Santa Ana and Anaheim are immediately north, Long Beach and Riverside a little further out, and San Diego and Los Angeles at either end of the coastal corridor. The Pacific division page puts California with the other West Coast states.