The Camino Real: Sixteen Hundred Miles of Imperial Road
Near El Paso, Texas
San Elizario sits at the southern end of the Mission Valley, a small town whose presidio was moved to this site by Spanish soldiers in seventeen eighty-nine to guard a corridor that had already been in use for nearly two hundred years. This stretch of the Rio Grande is where the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the Royal Road of the Interior, crossed from New Spain into the territory the Spanish called Nuevo México.
The Camino Real was sixteen hundred miles long. It ran from Mexico City north through Chihuahua, crossed the Rio Grande near here, continued north through what is now New Mexico, and ended at San Juan Pueblo, now called Ohkay Owingeh, north of Santa Fe. It was the economic and administrative spine of Spain's northern empire in North America. For more than two hundred years, from Oñate's crossing in fifteen ninety-eight until Mexican independence in eighteen twenty-one, virtually everything that moved in and out of New Mexico traveled this road.
The goods moved both directions. Silver from the mines of Chihuahua moved south. Hides, wool, and salt from the northern pueblos moved south. Religious supplies and military equipment moved north. So did soldiers going to suppress rebellions, and priests going to found missions, and settlers going to claim land grants. So did enslaved people, Indigenous captives taken in raids and sold into labor in the mining districts of northern Mexico. The trade in enslaved Indigenous people, primarily Apaches and Navajos captured in raids, was a significant and rarely discussed component of the Camino Real economy.
The United States designated the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro a National Historic Trail in two thousand. It follows roughly the same course as the modern highway that runs through San Elizario today. The ground you see around you has been road for four hundred years.
