All the books I’ve checked and the sites I visit say that El Paso is the largest border city. But my maps show that the border of San Diego runs down to Mexico.
Also what is the largest Mexican city on the border? I’ve seen quotes of Juarez around 700,000 but I’ve seen Mexicali (what a cool name btw it’s border city is the MUCH smaller Calexico) at 700,000 and Tijuana at as much as a million.
What is the SD? Which is the REAL winner?
No. San Ysidro is south of San Diego.
http://www.indo.com/cgi-bin/dist/place1=@18087/place2=@18131
San Diego’s city limits touch the Mexican border, but it’s a small portion of the city that is not contiguous with the rest of the city; it’s separated by National City and Chula Vista. The area, called San Ysidro, is thought of as a separate community but it’s actually part of the City of San Diego. See http://pele.sandag.org/website/viewdata2/viewer.htm
Almost all of El Paso’s southern city limits touch the Mexican border in the middle of the Rio Grande.
San Diego has 1,223,400 residents. 563,662 unlucky souls call El Paso home.
San Diego touches the border, but El Paso touches it more. That doesn’t mean San Diego is not a border city, though.
I lived in San Diego in the sixties.
IIRC Dan Diego did not at that time extend to the border: San Ysidro was a separate incorporation and a strip running from the borders of Imperial Beach just west of I5 back through Nestor and all the way to Brown Field were unincorporated, thus making SD separate from the border. North of this are Chula Vista and National City, both separate incorporations. In the late sixties or early seventies, SD incorporated a lot of the land south of the city and I believe that SD may now extend to the border, having incorporated land east of CV and NC and possibly now reaching the border, including the second border crossing on I905, thus making it a border city at last!
San Ysidro: http://www.sanysidrochamber.org/
Of course, if San Ysidro has since been incorporated as part of SD it will be a true border town.
http://www.arjis.org/.esrimap?name=mapgen&subcmd=start&mapview=3
This map implies that San Diego did not incorporate east of CV NC and only incorporated the area to the south, thus making it a detached area. It also implies that San Ysidro may be part of this attachment.
So San Diego is only a border town in that it has attached a separate area which is on the border.
So SD is still not really a border town as you cannot drive from Downtown to the border without passing through the county or another incorporation.
Open to correction if any one can add further information.
San Diego abuts the border. And it’s contiguous with the city proper. The border of San Diego includes a strip of harbor that runs down the South Bay and connects San Ysidro and the portion of San Diego to the north.
Just the SD from a map geek who’s a San Diegan.
So, San Diego used not to abut the border. IIRC South San Diego was a separate incorporation in the sixties.
By incorporating an essentially detached area (except by water ski) it has become a border city.
So, historically Juarez, not SD, was the largest border town.
Any claim that SD has to being the biggest border town now is limited by the essentially detached nature of the part of the city that is on the border.
I think you must have already been limiting it to “US Border Cities” anyway, since elsewhere in the world there must surely be some large cities on the borders (say, in Europe for instance).
Juarez, Mexico, as you say, is larger than El Paso (and consistently has been, although they’ve both seen growth). Their tourism page says they have just under 2 million people, but statistics from The World Gazetteer places the population at 1.3 million. (But then, the same source has Tijuana at almost the same).
(From an ex-El Paso native who was in San Diego last week!)