El Campo Santo

The brick wall bordering El Campo Santo creates a clear line between the sidewalk and the graves within. This cemetery holds the remains of nearly five hundred people, mostly settlers and members of the Kumeyaay nation, interred between eighteen forty-nine and eighteen eighty. By the late nineteenth century, the city paved over many of these graves to build San Diego Avenue, leaving markers embedded in the street and sidewalk to show where the dead still lie beneath the asphalt and the feet of passersby.