Learn About Ciudad Juarez and El Paso del Norte - Ciudad Juárez, also known as just Juárez and formerly known as El Paso del Norte, is a city and seat of the municipality of Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Juárez has an estimated population of 1.5 million people. It stands on the Rio Grande (Río Bravo del Norte), across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas.
El Paso and Ciudad Juárez comprise one of the largest binational metropolitan areas in the world with a combined population of 2.5 million people. In fact, Ciudad Juárez is one the fastest growing cities in the world. For instance, a few years ago, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas published that in Ciudad Juárez “the average annual growth over the 10-year period [1990-2000] was 5.3 percent. Juárez experienced much higher population growth than the state of Chihuahua and than Mexico as a whole.” In 2000, the United Nations reported that the world's population was growing at a rate of 1.14%.
More than 60,000 people cross the Juárez-El Paso border every day making it a major port of entry and transportation for all of central northern Mexico. The city has a growing industrial center which is made up in large part by the more than 300 maquiladoras located in and around the city. According to a recent New York Times article, Ciudad Juárez “is now absorbing more new industrial real estate space than any other North American city.” In 2008, Ciudad Juárez was designated as “The City of the Future” by the prestigious magazine “Foreign Direct Investment” published by the influential “Financial Times group.”. However, the city is also a site of widespread poverty and violence, including an infamous series of unsolved murders of female factory workers.
According to the prestigious magazine América Economía, this border metropolis has always been ranked as one of the best major cities to do business in Latin America. The binational metropolitan area of Ciudad Juárez-El Paso is "ranked 16th in trade among the largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States."
The New York Times has commented on the exquisite restaurants of Ciudad Juárez, describing them as places that offer “the old-school bon-vivant elegance of Mexico as well as some excellent culinary innovation |
