El Campo Santo Cemetery

Old Town's 1849 Catholic cemetery — many graves now under the roadway after the streetcar track was laid through it in 1889

El Campo Santo Cemetery is one of the oldest surviving graveyards in California, established in 1849 as the Catholic burial ground for Old Town San Diego. The walled enclosure holds around 50 visible headstones from the early American period of San Diego's history — Mexican-era residents, early American settlers, and a few Chinese labourers. The inscriptions are in English, Spanish, and occasionally German.

The cemetery's curiosity is the unmarked graves under the road and sidewalk of San Diego Avenue. In 1889 the streetcar builders extended the track through the edge of the cemetery without moving the bodies; small bronze plaques now mark the locations in the pavement. The road carries traffic over the graves of people buried here in the 1850s and 1860s.

The cemetery is directly on San Diego Avenue in the heart of Old Town, a two-minute walk from the Old Town State Historic Park entrance.

things to do sight history
A story
When the horse-drawn streetcar line was extended through Old Town in 1889, the builders simply paved through a section of El Campo Santo cemetery without relocating the graves. The road and later the pavement of San Diego Avenue covered perhaps eighteen graves. In 1933, a survey found that an estimated 477 people were buried in the cemetery, far more than the visible markers indicated. Researchers have placed small plaques in the sidewalk and road surface at points corresponding to known burials.