The Pass of the North — a crossing in the mountains that has carried four centuries of history. El Paso sits in the gap where the Rio Grande breaks out of the southern Rockies, the natural pass that everything moving between Mexico and the American Southwest funneled through for four hundred years. A Spanish expedition named it "El Paso del Norte," the Pass of the North, in 1598; the oldest mission in Texas rose nearby a few generations later. Today it is the Sun City, set at the foot of the Franklin Mountains, with a star lit on the slope above it and a sun that almost never quits. This page tells the story of the Pass.
The Pass keeps its stories close. They'll tell you the name is literal — this really is the pass, the one gap where the river leaves the mountains. They'll point up at the star on the Franklins and out at the Mission Trail, where Ysleta has held services since the 1680s. They'll tell you El Paso runs on Mountain time while the rest of Texas runs on Central, because the Pass has always kept its own clock. And they'll tell you about the sun — that this is the Sun City, where the sky is clear almost every day of the year.
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.
