Valencia, California

Why you should experience Valencia in Los Angeles, California.

Valencia is a gardened enclave where the Santa Clarita Valley's suburban expansion meets a meticulously composed new-town plan, village-scale residential districts and rolling former ranchland shaped into one of Southern California's most consequential postwar communities.

Positioned between Saugus, Newhall, and Stevenson Ranch, the neighborhood occupies the western floor of the Santa Clarita Valley, where broad avenues cross gently rising ground between the Santa Clara River corridor and foothills extending toward the western edge of the basin. Curving residential streets, mature tree cover, landscaped medians and low-density village clusters break the terrain into distinct pockets whose physical character remains unusually cohesive across successive phases of development. McBean Parkway supplies the primary encounter through a sweeping central corridor whose broad curves connect residential districts across the valley floor without reproducing the rigid street geometry associated with older Los Angeles suburbs. Valencia Boulevard creates a secondary passage across the community, traversing changing elevations and linking established eastern neighborhoods with later development extending westward across former ranch acreage. The result is a neighborhood whose controlled street geometry, extensive landscaping and village-scale composition preserve the physical ambitions of a purpose-built California new town more than half a century after its first residents arrived.

What you should know about Valencia.

Valencia is best known for converting a vast portion of the Newhall Land and Farming Company's agricultural holdings into a master-planned community conceived during the explosive metropolitan growth of postwar Southern California. The ground formed part of Rancho San Francisco, the Mexican land grant associated with Antonio del Valle before Henry Mayo Newhall purchased the rancho for $90,000 in 1875, anticipating the arrival of Southern Pacific through the Santa Clarita Valley. Newhall's heirs organized the Newhall Land and Farming Company in 1883, and the property subsequently supported cattle, grain, citrus and other agricultural operations across tens of thousands of acres. By the 1950s, agriculture alone no longer supplied the economic future company leaders envisioned for land increasingly surrounded by metropolitan expansion. Newhall Land created the California Land Company during the following decade and selected 4,000 acres on the eastern portion of its holdings for a new community. Victor Gruen Associates spent two years developing the plan with specialized consultants, arranging a major center around villages, neighborhood clusters and dedicated educational, recreational and industrial areas. Interstate 5 reached the area in 1965, strengthening the connection between the emerging community and the Los Angeles metropolitan region immediately before residential construction accelerated. Old Orchard became the first neighborhood, and Valencia formally entered its residential era in 1967 as families purchased houses on streets occupying former agricultural ground. The first development phase established a model that subsequently expanded across thousands of acres, turning the Newhall company from a major agricultural landholder into the principal author of a new suburban community.

Pedestrian circulation became one of the most distinctive components of Victor Gruen Associates' conception, separating substantial portions of neighborhood movement from the automobile network through a connected system of landscaped paseos. Underpasses carried these paths beneath major streets, allowing residential clusters, parks and commercial centers to remain linked across road corridors without requiring pedestrians to cross traffic at grade. The first sections accompanied Old Orchard and the opening residential villages, embedding the paths within landscaped greenbelts that threaded behind houses and through neighborhood interiors. Los Angeles County created its first local landscape maintenance zones in Old Orchard in 1972, supporting the planted areas surrounding the developing paseo network. Subsequent Valencia villages extended the concept, turning a feature introduced with the earliest neighborhoods into a community-wide circulation pattern spanning successive generations of construction. Santa Clarita now maintains more than 29 miles of paseos within a broader municipal landscape network containing tens of thousands of trees, yet Valencia remains the place where the system first became integral to the physical composition of the valley's residential districts. The enduring combination of separated paths, planted corridors and village connections gives Valencia a coherent internal geography rooted directly in the human-scaled ambitions of its original new-town plan.

How to fold Valencia into your trip.

Valencia works as the anchor for an outing connecting an experimental arts institute conceived through Walt Disney's educational ambitions, a theme park created to accelerate the emergence of the new town and a relocated railroad depot preserving the transportation history that preceded suburban Santa Clarita.

Begin at California Institute of the Arts, whose institutional origins joined the Chouinard Art Institute and Los Angeles Conservatory of Music under a multidisciplinary concept championed by Walt Disney. Herbert Blau and a core faculty group developed an educational model during the late 1960s around independent artistic work and sustained exchange among artistic disciplines, and construction of the permanent campus began in 1969 around a five-level, 500,000-square-foot building by Ladd & Kelsey. The Valencia campus opened fully in fall 1971 with more than 650 students; Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro launched the Feminist Art Program that year, and the Character Animation Program founded in 1975 placed future filmmakers Tim Burton, Brad Bird, John Lasseter, John Musker and Henry Selick within its inaugural class. Continue to Six Flags Magic Mountain, born from discussions between Sea World executives and Newhall Land as the latter sought a major regional attraction beside its emerging community. The partners committed $20 million to a 200-acre amusement park at Valencia's western edge, and Magic Mountain opened on May 29, 1971, initially using Warner Bros. characters through a first-year licensing arrangement before developing Bloop, Bleep, King Troll and the Wizard as its own cast in 1972. The park placed a major leisure destination beside the still-young residential community only four years after Valencia's first homebuyers arrived. Conclude at Heritage Junction, where the Saugus Train Station preserves the railroad era that reshaped the valley decades before Valencia existed. Southern Pacific established the Saugus location along its Ventura branch during the 1880s, completing the substantial two-story passenger and freight depot in 1888; its position at the junction supported passenger movement, freight activity and an eating house that became an important stopping place along the line. Passenger service ended in 1971, the depot closed in 1978 and a community fundraising campaign saved the threatened building, moving it about two miles to Heritage Junction in June 1980. The progression moves from a purpose-built institute that reimagined arts education through a regional attraction created alongside the new community and culminates at the surviving railroad depot from the valley's nineteenth-century transportation era, connecting three institutions that mark radically different stages in the making of modern Santa Clarita.

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