El Paso, Texas map

El Paso is closer by road to San Diego (about 720 miles on I-10 and I-8) than to Houston (745 miles), and closer to the capitals of New Mexico and Arizona than to Austin. It is one of only two Texas counties on Mountain Time (the other is Hudspeth). The city borders New Mexico on the north and west (Sunland Park, Las Cruces is 45 miles up I-10) and Mexico on the south.

Franklin Mountains State Park, the largest urban park in the country entirely within a city, cuts El Paso in two. Trans Mountain Road (Loop 375) crosses it between the Northeast and the Westside.

El Paso County held 865,657 people in 2020 across 1,015 square miles, tenth in the state, and the city holds about four-fifths of them. The rest live downstream along the river in Socorro (34,301), Horizon City (22,488) and San Elizario (10,116), plus the small towns of Anthony, Vinton and Clint. Hudspeth County, to the southeast, is the only Texas county it borders; the other two neighbors, Doña Ana and Otero, are in New Mexico.

The Rio Grande does two jobs here. Downstream of the bridges it is the international boundary, and it stays the boundary for the rest of its course to the Gulf. Upstream of them the far bank is New Mexico — Sunland Park sits across the water from the Westside — and the river carries the Texas–New Mexico line north until, a few miles above the city, it reaches the 32nd parallel. That corner is where Texas stops following the river and the state line turns east across the desert.

The Franklins come down out of New Mexico and stop at the pass above downtown, which is what splits El Paso into a Westside facing the river and a Northeast on the far side of the rock. North Franklin Peak, at 7,192 feet, is the range's high point and the highest ground in the county — more than 3,000 feet above the streets at the river. Almost no cross-town street gets through: traffic uses Trans Mountain Road over Smuggler's Pass at the north end, Scenic Drive around the southern tip, or Loop 375 the long way around.

Franklin Mountains State Park covers more than 24,000 acres of the range inside the city limits, with trailheads on both sides and the Tom Mays unit off Trans Mountain Road. McKelligon Canyon, on the east face, holds an outdoor amphitheater in a box canyon. The mountains are also why the city's water and power lines run in a ring rather than a grid, and why the Westside and Northeast feel like separate towns.

Fort Bliss began as an army post in 1849 and now takes up the ground north and east of the city, running up the Tularosa Basin well into New Mexico; its training ranges make it one of the largest Army installations by land area. US-54, the Patriot Freeway, is the line between the main post and central El Paso, and the 1st Armored Division is headquartered there. William Beaumont Army Medical Center moved from its old site near Fort Bliss to a new campus on the east side in 2021.

Biggs Army Airfield lies inside the post, north of the main cantonment, with a runway long enough for heavy transports. El Paso International Airport is immediately south of it, about five miles northeast of downtown off Airway Boulevard, so the two fields share the same approach airspace.

Ciudad Juárez, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, is the larger half of this metro, and the two cities function as one labor market split by a river. Four crossings connect them. The Paso del Norte bridge at the foot of El Paso Street and the Stanton Street bridge run one way each, into and out of downtown, and both are short enough to walk. The Bridge of the Americas, reached by the I-110 spur down from I-10, is the toll-free crossing. The Ysleta–Zaragoza bridge, southeast in the Mission Valley near the old missions, is the one built for commercial trucks.