Long before any European arrived, Pueblo and desert peoples lived and traded along the Rio Grande at the Pass. In 1598 a Spanish expedition led by Juan de Onate reached the river and gave the crossing its lasting name — El Paso del Norte, the Pass of the North. The mission tradition followed: Fray Garcia de San Francisco founded the first mission of the Pass in 1659, and in 1682, after the Pueblo Revolt drove refugees and the Tigua south, the Ysleta and Socorro missions were built — the oldest in Texas, with Ysleta del Sur Pueblo recognized as the oldest town in the state. For four centuries the Pass was a crossroads on the Camino Real, the royal road of the Spanish Southwest.
The north bank settlement that became modern El Paso took shape after 1827, and in 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo placed it in United States territory, with Fort Bliss established the same year. When the railroad arrived in 1881, El Paso boomed into a wide-open crossroads of the Old West. Through all of it the city kept the identity the Spanish had named: the Pass — a place defined by the crossing itself, by two languages and two countries sharing one desert valley, and by the mountains that frame it.
Why People Visit El Paso Texas
People come to El Paso for the desert light and the layered history — the Pass of the North, the oldest mission in Texas, the star on the mountain — and for the mountains, the Mission Trail, and the bicultural energy of a Sun City that shares one valley with its neighbor across the river. It is sunny, spacious, and deep: four centuries of the Southwest at the Pass.
