EL PASO, Texas (KFOX14/CBS4) — Concordia Cemetery isn’t just a quiet patch of El Paso history — it’s a full-on time capsule, with more than 60,000 burials stretching back to the city’s earliest days.
Local history enthusiast Caleb Lara kicked off a new monthly segment on El Paso’s past from inside the cemetery, calling it the perfect starting point for anyone trying to understand how the city became what it is today. The cemetery’s first burial dates to 1856, and Lara said it became public in the 1880s. He described the way Concordia is laid out with different sections and groupings as a reflection of the culture and structure of the growing city itself.
It’s really a great way to get a scope of everything that has happened,” Lada said, pointing to the range of people buried there, “from immigrants to Wild Wild West cowboys to societies to lawmen…