Hotel El Capitan

Van Horn grew up as a stop on the Texas and Pacific Railway, and in its early days it had a reputation to match the country. A local legend holds that rancher A. S. Goynes suggested the town motto, This Town Is So Healthy We Had to Shoot a Man to Start a Cemetery, and was soon shot dead in a feud over a watering hole, becoming the first man buried there. By the late 1930s the town had grown to about 1,600 people, helped by automobile traffic on US-80 and by its place on the road to the Guadalupe Mountains and Carlsbad Caverns.

Hotel El Capitan was built for that traffic. The El Paso architect Henry Trost designed it in 1930 in the Spanish Revival style, with courtyards, balconies and patios, and named it for El Capitan, the great limestone cliff at the south end of the Guadalupe Mountains, about 60 miles to the north.

The hotel has been restored and is open again as an inn, with rooms around the courtyards, a restaurant and the Gopher Hole Bar, where the staff will tell you about the old vault. Van Horn stands at a crossroads between Guadalupe Mountains and Big Bend national parks, and lately it has become a base for watching rocket launches from the Blue Origin site nearby. Even if you are not staying, the lobby and courtyard are worth a stop off Interstate 10.