Facts
About El Paso
El
Paso is the sight of the actual first Thanksgiving in April, 1598,
predating the Pilgrims by 23 years.
Guadalupe Mission in Juárez was founded in 1659.
El Paso/Juárez/Las Cruces is the largest International Metroplex in
the world with a combined population of about 2.3 million.
El Paso is the third safest major city in the U.S.
The sun shines in El Paso approximately 302 days per year, earning it
the nickname “Sun City.”
El Paso has four international ports of entry.
The El Paso area has the largest pecan orchard in the world, Stahman
Farms.
The oldest continuously active missions in the U.S. are in the El
Paso/Juárez area. Ysleta Mission, Soccorro Mission and San Elizario.
El Paso has 2,000-year-old pictographs at Hueco Tanks State Park.
There is also graffiti, from the 1800s, done in wagon axle grease.
On
August 12, 2000, Hueco Tanks State Park was the borderline of a very
bright and unusually rare "pulsing" display of the Alaskan
Northern Lights, which were pushed thousands of miles South to El
Paso's starry desert skies by the Sun's current peak of powerful
explosions.
The El Paso star is 459 feet in length and 278 feet in width. It has
459 light bulbs and can be seen for 100 miles from the air and for 30
miles on the ground.
From Scenic Drive, just below the star on the mountain, one can see
into two nations and three states.
Texas’ finest strain of bluebonnets, its state flower, is grown
several miles southeast of El Paso.
The notorious outlaw, John Wesley Hardin, was assassinated in downtown
El Paso and buried in Concordia Cemetery. Other famous outlaws active
in the region were Billy the Kid and Pancho Villa.
El Paso was the mid-point of the Butterfield Overland Mail, which ran
stagecoaches from St. Louis to San Francisco. Overland Street was
named for the company, which built a large hotel at approximately the
point where the Museum of Art is today.
The stained glass Tiffany dome in the Camino Real, Paso del Norte
Hotel would cost $1 million to replace today, if it were done in
plastic.
White Sands Missile Range covers about 4,000 square miles of Southern
New Mexico desert. The southernmost edge of this test range is about
20 miles north of El Paso. The world’s first atomic device was
tested there at Trinity site. The Space Shuttle has landed at the
range, which is an alternate Shuttle landing site.
Fort Bliss, established in 1848, is the duty station for approximately
12,500 active duty military personnel, while employing over 7,000
civilians, and has a land mass of over 1.1 million acres. The economic
impact of Fort Bliss on El Paso is $1.2 billion, making it the largest
single industry in El Paso.
Being in the westernmost tip of Texas, and due to the huge size of the
state, El Paso is closer to five other state capitals than it is to
its own capital of Austin, Texas.
The
now dry Persimmon and Wasburn Springs of the neighboring Cornudas
Mountains were used by the drivers of the Butterfield Mail Route.
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