Tijuana opened Municipal Cemetery 15 in the Santa Fe neighborhood near the Cedros housing development, adding space for roughly 4,000 burials on a four-hectare site. Cemetery director Carlos Haros said the facility has already received 11 burials (10 adults and one child) since it began operations.
Expected to Fill Within 18 Months
Haros said the new Tijuana municipal cemetery is expected to reach capacity within one to one and a half years. That timeline puts the city’s burial rate at roughly 7 to 11 per day across its cemetery system, a pace driven by Tijuana’s sustained high mortality and violence rates.
The designation as Cemetery 15 places it in a long line of municipal burial grounds. Tijuana’s oldest public cemetery, Panteón Municipal No. 1 on Avenida Venustiano Carranza, has operated since 1918. The city has steadily added facilities over the past century as its population exploded from a few thousand to an estimated 2.2 million residents today.
Part of a Broader Burial Capacity Crisis
Burial infrastructure has been a persistent challenge for the city. In October 2023, Baja California’s state government broke ground on a separate “forensic cemetery” designed to hold unidentified remains. That facility, built in four phases, was planned for an eventual capacity of 12,000 bodies. César González Vaca, then director of Baja California Forensic Services, said the forensic cemetery would receive remains that passed through medical examiner offices and went unclaimed.
At the time, González Vaca noted that roughly 13,000 unidentified remains already sat in common graves across the state. He called it impractical to exhume those bodies, so the forensic cemetery would handle only new cases going forward.
Cemetery 15 serves a different function. It is a standard municipal burial ground for identified remains, located in the Santa Fe area in Tijuana’s southeastern sprawl. Santa Fe sits near the Cedros residential development, a relatively new housing zone that has expanded rapidly in recent years along the city’s eastern periphery.
Haros did not say whether the city has plans for a Cemetery 16 once the new site fills. At the current projected pace, Tijuana will need another burial site by late 2027 at the latest, as reported by Zeta Tijuana.