El Campo Santo Cemetery   

2410 San Diego Ave.
San Diego, CA 92110
619-220-5422

San Diego County, Tombstone Photos 

El Campo Santo Cemetery, Old Town, San Diego County

Photos

Submitted by Larry Clark 2004
Submitted by Ed Jepsen May 2008

San Diego's second oldest cemetery, El Campo Santo, dates back to 1849 with the burial of Juan Adams.

Burials continued through 1880, consisting of early San Diegans from varied backgrounds.

In 1889 a horse-drawn streetcar line was built through part of the cemetery, which later became San Diego Avenue.
The cemetery deteriorated over the years. In 1933, the San Diego Historical Society restored El Campo Santo as accurately as possible based on an early photograph and early descriptions. They built an adobe wall, reset markers, rebuilt paling enclosures, and placed a plain white cross in the center of the plot.
In 1942 it was finally paved over, leaving at least 20 graves under the street and sidewalk and 13 graves under Linwood Street.

Excerpt from: City of the forgotten dead By Kelly Davis 04/25/2007(San Diego City Beat)
For all this history, El Campo Santo's a shrunken version of what it once was, squeezed smaller by Old Town's rapid turn-of-the-century development. Mallios guesses that the cemetery's original boundaries were pushed in roughly 20 feet, leaving bodies buried outside the new cemetery walls, set in place in the 1930s. If you walk just outside El Campo Santo's front gate, there are small brass circles that say "Grave Site" embedded in the concrete sidewalk. Just above the sidewalk is a plaque: "Remembering the more than 20 men, women and children who lie buried beneath San Diego Avenue. "Only one guy, a state Assembly member, was exhumed and re-buried within the cemetery's new boundaries. The other graves are known to exist thanks to ground-penetrating radar.