Murrieta

Luiseño people founded a village on the spot where Murrieta stands now. They called it Avaa7ax, also written 'Avaa'ax. For most of its history the area had few people. On June 9, 1873, Domingo Pujol, Francisco Sanjurjo, and Juan and Ezequiel Murrieta bought the Rancho Pauba and Rancho Temecula land grants, which added up to 52,000 acres (210 km2). Ezequiel went back to Spain and handed the land to his younger brother Juan, who brought 7,000 sheep to the valley that year to graze on its meadows.

The partnership broke up in 1876, and the two brothers kept 15,000 acres of the northern half of the Temecula Rancho. In 1882 they granted a right-of-way, one hundred feet wide, to the California Southern Railroad. In 1884 the Temecula Land and Water Company bought about 14,500 acres from Juan Murrieta and mapped a townsite along the tracks. A depot built in 1887 tied the town to the Southern California Railroad's transcontinental route, and by 1890 some 800 people lived there.

Murrieta Hot Springs is a neighborhood in the eastern part of the city. Murrieta annexed it on July 1, 2002. Before that it was a census-designated place with 2,948 residents at the 2000 census. The Luiseño called the thermal springs Cherukanukna Hakiwuna, and they bathed in the warm water and took mud baths there. Spanish settlers later used the water for healing too. Like the city, the springs took the name of Juan Murrieta, because they lay on his land grant.

A Chinese laundry used the springs before the Temecula Land & Water Company developed the site in 1884 with a hotel and a bathhouse. In 1902 Fritz Guenther, a German who had settled in Los Angeles, bought the tract. He built two new hotels and a new bathhouse and later added cottages. The resort grew popular, particularly with Jewish visitors, who were excluded from some other resorts. The Guenther family ran the spa until the late 1960s. By then it had a 48-room hotel, an assembly hall, the 63-room Stone Lodge and a mosaic-tiled mudbath building (both built in 1926), a swimming pool from 1928 and a nature-care spa with private baths from 1936.

After the Guenthers, the property changed hands often. In January 1970 the spa and some 500 acres around it were sold to Irvin Kahn, a San Diego attorney and developer who had visited the spa as a child. He put a mobile home park above it and held golf and tennis tournaments. A synagogue was built next door in 1973, the year Kahn died unexpectedly. The resort closed in 1977. In 1982 a group called Alive Polarity bought it and ran a non-smoking, teetotal, vegetarian commune there. Gary Naiman of San Diego bought it in 1987 and renovated the guest rooms, and then the place was neglected again.

Calvary Chapel turned the site into a Bible college campus with dormitories, libraries and a conference center, and the college operated there from 1994 until 2022. In August 2022 Calvary Chapel sold the property to Olympus Real Estate Group, and it reopened as a spa resort in February 2024. The renovated 46-acre property has more than fifty geothermal pools, a second-story cedar sauna room and a geothermal mud experience. Its Kneipp Walk has guests wade through pools that run from 103°F down to 48°F.

Murrieta lived on the train and on its hot springs, which brought tourists. When the trains stopped in 1935, the tourists mostly stopped too, and the town shrank back into a small country place. US Route 395 had long passed through, but the next boom waited for Interstate 15, built in the early 1980s. By the late 1980s, suburban neighborhoods were going up, and people arrived from San Diego and Orange counties and from elsewhere in Riverside County.

Residents began a campaign for cityhood in 1990, and Murrieta incorporated on July 1, 1991. The population then was 24,000, up from 2,200 in 1980. Between 1991 and 2007 it climbed to an estimated 97,257. By the 2010 census it was 103,466, the largest city in southwestern Riverside County at that time.

The Santa Rosa Plateau is an upland in Riverside County and a southeastern extension of the Santa Ana Mountains. Murrieta bounds it to the northeast and Temecula to the southeast. The Santa Rosa Plateau Ecological Reserve protects approximately 8,400 acres of it. The reserve includes the Moreno and Machado Adobes, the oldest standing structures in Riverside County, and other buildings from the Mexican land grant Rancho Santa Rosa. It was assembled in stages: The Nature Conservancy bought two parcels totaling 3,100 acres in 1984, and the State of California, the Riverside County Regional Park and Open-Space District and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California bought the parcels between them in the 1990s.

The agencies still own their own parcels, but they manage the reserve together. The Nature Conservancy handles fire and habitat restoration, and RivCo Parks runs the visitor center and a 40-mile (60 km) trail system. The plateau holds purple needlegrass prairie, California oak woodland, montane chaparral, coastal sage scrub and vernal pools, which are increasingly rare in urbanized Southern California. Its Engelmann oaks are still reproducing. The tree was once widespread in the western U.S. and now grows no farther north than Pasadena.

Vernal pools fill with spring rain, and flowers grow in rings around them as they dry. The Chocolate Lily, usually seen in April, is the one flower people come to the reserve to find. At least 185 species of bird have been spotted there, and 27 species of mammal live there. The reserve is also one of only four to six reproductively viable populations of the Southwestern pond turtle in southern California.

People were here long before the ranchos. The first Native Americans are thought to have lived on the plateau for more than 8,000 years. The Luiseño began to live in the area about 1,500 years ago, and had a village called Meha near the ranch. They are thought to have used the plateau in the warm months and to have gathered acorns there in the fall. Grinding holes are still visible in boulders near the adobes. In 1846 Governor Pio Pico granted Juan Moreno 47,000 acres, and in 1855 Moreno sold Rancho Santa Rosa to Augustin Machado. Walter Vail bought the land in 1904, mainly to raise cattle.

The Town Square holds the police department, the public library, City Hall, a senior center and a $2 million veterans memorial. The city has 52 parks, including one community pool, one skate park, three sports parks, two dog parks, two disc golf courses and an equestrian park. The Murrieta Fire Department was all volunteer for 38 years before becoming a municipal fire protection district in 1987, and it runs five stations.

Golf has a long record here. Bear Creek Golf and Country Club was designed by Jack Nicklaus, and Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan have both played it. The Golf Club at Rancho California was designed by Robert Trent Jones, Sr. A television station, Channel 27, broadcasts from a hilltop in Murrieta.

Two interstates serve the city. Interstate 15 runs through the western part and Interstate 215 through the eastern part. Historic US Route 395, which follows Jefferson Avenue, Ivy Street and Washington Avenue, runs through downtown, and State Route 79 (Winchester Road) marks much of the eastern edge. Riverside Transit Agency routes 23, 61, 205 and 206 provide bus service. French Valley Airport, used for general aviation, is just east of the city limits.

The city could also host a station on the high-speed rail line voters approved in 2008 under Prop 1A. The proposed station would handle 8,000 daily riders and sits near the I-15 and I-215 interchange.

Most of the city is in the Murrieta Valley Unified School District, the third-largest public school district in Riverside County. It has eleven elementary schools, four middle schools and three comprehensive high schools: Murrieta Valley, Vista Murrieta and Murrieta Mesa. The middle schools are Dorothy McElhinney, Shivela, Thompson and Warm Springs. The district also runs a continuation school, Creekside High School, and an independent study school. A portion of the city falls in the Menifee Union School District and the Perris Union High School District.

Mt. San Jacinto College, with locations in Temecula and Menifee, is the nearest community college, and the University of California, Riverside is the nearest public university. Azusa Pacific University has a satellite campus in the city, and so does the University of Phoenix. Two hospitals serve Murrieta, Loma Linda University Medical Center and Rancho Springs Medical Center.

The city's list of notable people leans toward sport. Lindsay Davenport, the tennis player and Olympic gold medalist, graduated from Murrieta Valley High School in 1994, and the sprinter Michael Norman went to Vista Murrieta High School. The singer-songwriter Olivia Rodrigo is on the list too.