Spanish Cities and Caminos Reales (Royal Roads) in the U.S.

Versión en español

The Spanish presence in the current United States gave rise to many settlements, which usually retain their Hispanic names. They include St. Augustine (Florida), Santa Fe and Albuquerque (New Mexico), El Paso and San Antonio (Texas) or San Diego, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and San Francisco (California), some of which have already been mentioned. Populations often developed around a presidio (fort or garrison of soldiers).

Santa Bárbara Presidio (California)

Communications were often made over what were called royal roads, such as the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro [Royal Road of the Interior Land], which ran from Mexico City to Santa Fe (New Mexico). Another was the Camino Real de los Texas [Royal Road of the Tejas Indians], which had several branches and made it easy to reach this province from the center of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. It ended in Natchitoches, in modern Louisiana.

There were other later routes, such as the Anza Trail, which allowed travel from Sonora and Arizona to California; the Santa Fe Trail, which linked St. Louis Missouri) with the capital of New Mexico; or the Old Spanish Trail, which went from Santa Fe to Los Angeles, passing through Colorado and Utah, part of which was already known to the Spaniards by the seventeenth century.

The above five roads and routes have been declared National Historic Trails.

Another route, which is not a National Historic Trail and overlaps part of the Anza Route, is the so-called Historic California Missions Trail, which links the 21 missions founded in that state

Roads and routes declared National Historic Trails.

It is also known as the Camino Español [Spanish Trail], which crossed the southern United States from St. Augustine (Florida) to link with the Camino Real de los Tejas. The stretch from St. Augustine to Pensacola was much used, while its location was Spanish territory, unlike the stretch from Mobila to Texas, due to the repeated changes of sovereignty of Louisiana.

The roads articulated cities and towns, haciendas, missions and presidios, which constituted the bases of colonization and trade, of the diffusion of the Spanish language, culture, legislation and religion.

When the Anglo-Americans arrived in the territories of the Southwest that had previously been provinces of the Hispanic Monarchy, they did not find empty, unexplored and wild territories, but inhabited, well known ones with a mixed-race culture with Spanish roots.

Text extracted and adapted from The Hispanic Roots of the United States by courtesy of Asociación Cultural Héroes de Cavite.