Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan move to Santa Barbara County, where Oprah is a neighbor

After about three months in a Los Angeles County mansion, Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan have moved to Santa Barbara County, where celebrity pals such as Oprah Winfrey will be their neighbors.

“The Duke and Duchess of Sussex moved into their family home in July of this year," a person familiar with the matter but not authorized to speak publicly told USA TODAY. "They have settled into the quiet privacy of their community since their arrival and hope that this will be respected for their neighbors, as well as for them as a family."

The questions now being batted about in the media – such as, did they buy or rent, how much did they pay, who paid for it, and how close are they to Oprah Winfrey's magnificent spread in exclusive Montecito – are going unanswered as of now.

But speculation rages, as per usual with anything involving the Sussexes.

A search of Santa Barbara County's real estate records revealed nothing related to a royal purchase Wednesday.

It makes sense that Harry and Meghan's reps in California would be mum about the exact location of their new digs because of what happened at their rented mansion in Beverly Ridge Estates in the hills above Los Angeles: Endless dronerazzi, swooping low over the backyard to capture photos of baby Archie, who turned 1 in May.

Harry and Meghan were so alarmed by multiple snooping drones, operated allegedly by paparazzi, they filed a lawsuit last month against unnamed photographers to stop the "disgusting and wrong" sale of a photograph they believe was taken of Archie in their yard.

Since the Sussexes announced in January they were stepping away from their royal roles and moving to North America in search of more independence and privacy, they have been rarely seen out and about, thanks in part to the pandemic quarantine. So they are likely very pleased they managed to move to Santa Barbara in July without word leaking out until mid-August.

When they arrived in Los Angeles in March, the couple moved into a sprawling estate, widely reported to have been borrowed from media mogul Tyler Perry. They had just left another borrowed estate on Vancouver Island in Canada to head south before the border with the U.S. closed due to the pandemic.

The Sussex's new home in Santa Barbara would be their fourth abode since January, including Frogmore Cottage on the Windsor Castle estate, which belongs to his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II.

The couple are paying back more than $2 million spent for renovations of dilapidated Frogmore after the queen gifted the house to the couple. (It's not a cottage in the American sense of the term; it's a "cottage" only in comparison to gigantic Windsor Castle nearby.)

Santa Barbara, sometimes called the American Riviera or Hollywood-North, has been popular with the rich and famous for more than a century, given its Spanish Colonial Revival architecture, lovely beaches and relative proximity to the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. The county itself used to host a dozen studios back in the old days.

Some of the celebrities who live or have lived in Santa Barbara, especially super-pricey Montecito, besides Oprah, include Ellen DeGeneres, Drew Barrymore, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Costner.

On the other hand, Montecito also has been the center of recent disasters including wildfires and mudslides.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Prince Harry, Duchess Meghan move from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara