Earlier in the day, Steven and I had toured the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, located south of Socorro, before heading north to Belén, a friend's former hometown. We then turned around again, this time heading southeast to explore most of the Salinas Pueblo National Monument, which includes the remains of a trio of pueblos and mission churches. As we'd learned at the Jemez Pueblo in the first few days of our New Mexico road trip, the churches were built by pueblo residents under duress by Franciscan priests in the early years of the Conquest.
Cutting through the southern edge of the Manzanaro Mountains, the Abó Pass Trail has always been an important trade route. It linked the Abó pueblo and the other Salinas pueblos to the Rio Grande pueblos, encouraging trade of beans, cotton, buffalo meat, and salt with the Plains Indians. It provided access to El Camino Real and Highway 60, which was initially a coast-to-coast highway. One of the world’s busiest intermodal transportation routes, the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway runs through Abó Canyon, just north of Abó Pass.
Steven mentioned we could have been on a wagon train; it was so desolate!
The goal of the Salinas Monument is to preserve the remnants of three indigenous villages, or pueblos, where Spanish priests established missions nearly 400 years ago. The pueblos were major trade centers for centuries prior to the arrival of Spanish explorers. Salt taken from the nearby dry salt lakes or salinas was a highly valued commodity traded between Pueblo and Plains peoples, so crucial that Spanish government officials referred to this entire region as the Salinas Jurisdiction.
For over 500 years, beginning in the early 12th century, the Tompiro-speaking Pueblo people prospered in the Abó Valley. From 1622 until approximately 1673, Franciscan priests resided at the Abó Pueblo as they endeavored to "civilize" and Christianize the indigenous populations of this remote northern frontier of the Spanish Empire. When a single Spanish priest walked into Abó in 1622, a spiritual, material, and cultural revolution started there, and nothing would be the same again. Abó was the remote edge of a vast empire that included religious outposts in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. But, just 50 years after the encounter between the two very different cultures, both the village and the mission were empty.
In 1583, Spanish explorer Antonio Espejo reported that this area had "eleven pueblos with a great many people, over 40,000." Now, grasses and silence, and an occasional rattlesnake, reigned in the once-thriving town of Abó, where, for over 800 years, Puebloans, Spanish Franciscan priests, and later sheep ranchers had lived.
After Abó became head of one of the most significant missionary operations in New Mexico in 1629, a second church, completed around 1651, was built by expanding onto the original church, which was built between 1622 and 1627.
Rock walls and unearthed relics can only tell visitors so much about what people believed 350 years ago. This mysterious, round structure resembled a kiva, an underground meeting chamber in Puebloan tradition. Kivas were likely used for conducting religious ceremonies, educating children, telling stories, and weaving. However, this particular stone room was built at the same time as the Catholic mission. Discovering what appears to be a kiva in the heart of the mission has raised numerous questions about the relationship between two faiths. Could it have been used in religious conversion?
Visitors to the mission were invited to imagine the pueblo's young boys hurrying up these worn stairs to join the adults in the choir loft above. After Franciscans in Mexico in the 1500s had noted how powerfully music had aided their mission efforts, they brought not only traditions of songs but also wind instruments and portable pipe organs up the Camino Real to frontier New Mexico missions.
A sign advised visitors that, as the ruins were considered tierra sagrada, or sacred ground to many people, they should be treated with respect.
This church nave was the mission's spiritual heart. When indigenous worshippers and nearby Spanish settlers came to hear Mass in the 17th century, they stood and knelt, as there were no pews. The priest chanted the liturgy of the Mass in Latin, the same as in any Roman Catholic church in Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Americas at that time.
Baptismal ceremonies were performed in the baptistery for new Christians.
As we exited the church ruins, we noticed a complex maze of rooms known as the convento, where the indigenous people would have headed livestock, ground corn, and maintained the church property, tackling many tasks central to running a mission.
These mounds are all that remain of the ancient village of Abó, which served as a center for commerce and ceramic production for 300 years. Indigenous traders came from the Great Plains and nearby pueblos to Abó Pueblo to barter for pottery, salt, corn, and pinon nuts. After 1600, the Spanish began to ship wagonloads of the same products down the Camino Real in exchange for mission supplies shipped north from Mexico City every three years.
About a fifteen-minute walk from the church, the arroyo or stream, and the spring-fed Espinosa Creek provided the water necessary for life in Abó's dry climate. Catch basins trapped runoff that was used to water terraced fields further down the valley.
Erosion exposed the sandstone, which provided the building blocks to construct the pueblo and the mission.
I read that the 1600s were a time of drought, famine, Apache uprisings, disease, and clashing cultures in the Salinas mission district. After living here for more than 500 years, the Tompiro people left Abó by the 1670s for the relative safety of the Rio Grande pueblos near present-day Socorro. Strangely, there was nothing mentioned as to what happened to the Franciscan priests who had established the mission after their flock left.
In 1853, almost 175 years after the Tompinos and Franciscans had departed, a U.S. Army expedition arrived at Abó. Their leader, Major James Carleton, wrote: "In the mystery that envelops everything connected with these ruins... There is much for very interesting speculation...it will be for the painter and poet to restore to its original beauty, this venerable temple..."
After leaving the Abó Mission en route to the Qarai Mission, we stopped in the quiet town of Mountainair, once known as the Pinto Bean Capital of the World, which had hundreds of employees. The industry in Mountainair ended after a ten-year drought from 1946 to 1956. The area's primary industry is now ranching, with residents choosing to live in Mountainair because of its recreational opportunities, rural character, and small-town atmosphere.
The Salinas Pueblo Mission Visitors Center was located in Mountainair, also known as the Gateway to the Ancient Cities. We didn't have time to visit the Gran Quivira Mission, located 26 miles south of Mountainair.
I know Mountainair was just a small town, but it was still unusual that we saw no one wandering down its main street.
The Pueblo Art Deco-style Historic Shaffer Hotel, built in 1923, was one of two buildings in the town listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Although no longer a hotel, the property continued to serve meals in its fascinating dining room, whose ceiling was decorated with carved and painted snakes, turtles, and other animals. The ceiling was why we had made a beeline for the hotel!
The northernmost of the Salinas Missions was Quarai, a pueblo also inhabited from the 14th to the 17th centuries. In 1981, Quarai and Abó were merged with Gran Quivira to form the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument.
Take a moment to click on the map to enlarge it and view the locations of the three missions.
The grass-covered mounds around us were actually the remains of a large masonry village or pueblo that likely had a population of about 400 people in the 1600s, according to ground surveys of the area and some mentions in Spanish records.
The grass-covered mounds around us were actually the remains of a large masonry village or pueblo that likely had a population of about 400 people in the 1600s, according to ground surveys of the area and some mentions in Spanish records.
Walking amid the mounds, I was reminded of the admonition to respect sacred ground.
The southern Tiwa people hunted and farmed the area, trading their goods and salt gathered from nearby lakebeds. The first blocks of houses were built about 1300. While evidence suggests that the town remained empty from approximately 1400 to the 1500s, a flurry of construction occurred before the arrival of the Spaniards in the early 1600s.
After coming over a rise from among the mounds, I was close to awestruck coming face to face with the grand adobe and sandstone mission that the Tiwa were "pressed to build" by the Spanish priests. We learned that the priests at Quarai were at odds with their Spanish governors, who helped to protect them, yet undermined their efforts to convert the indigenous people by encouraging ceremonial dances.
Franciscan friars were already administering to the people in neighboring pueblos when the first Spanish missionary arrived in Quarai in 1627, bringing only a cartload of tools and his books. Within just five years, the Tiwa women (not men, interestingly) had built this church, convent, and corrals. Aren't you also amazed at how much was achieved in such a short amount of time, considering the language and cultural barriers, as well as the difficulty in acquiring the necessary building materials?
The Tiwa-speaking people had migrated through the mountain canyons south of Albuquerque before 1300, establishing settlements on the eastern slope of the Manzano Mountains. Like the Abó pueblo people, the Quarai farmed, hunted, and gathered salt from the saline lakes in the valley. They took advantage of their location between the Rio Grande pueblos and the Plains Indians to become traders. The Tiwa language is still spoken at four pueblos in New Mexico, including Taos.
The red sandstone walls, once protected by adobe plaster and likely a finishing layer of white gypsum, were 40 feet high and rested on foundations 7 feet deep and 6 feet wide. Before entering the church, people were baptized as Christians in this baptistery.
This area was the walled resting place or campo santo of the baptized.
I found it impossible again not to be impressed at the size of the church, whose interior measured 100 feet long, with a 27-foot nave and a 50-foot transept.
At the top of the church walls were long, narrow sockets that held corbels, the carved and painted supports for the long beams that spanned the width of the church to support the roof.
Although other mission churches generally had packed-earth floors, Quarai's Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Cuarac had a flagstone floor. The stones at our feet were likely original, but they may not have been in their original layout.
Looking back at the entrance of the church:
In the sacristy, storage chests were filled with altar furnishings and vestments, and the priest prepared for Mass.
I don't remember hearing about a porteria before - it was a waiting room with benches along the walls for visitors waiting to see the priest.
Quarai was also the first place in New Mexico where we encountered the Seat of the Inquisition, literally where the priest named to head the Holy Office resided. During the 1630s, that was here at Quarai. Hearings were held to investigate Spanish settlers accused of misbehavior or heretical doctrine in courtyards like this one. Many charges involved superstitions, unfaithfulness, love potions, or witchcraft! Though the indigenous people were not subject to scrutiny, they were often called to testify.
The open-air patio was used by priests and other residents in the convento to meditate and tend a small garden. This patio was unusual for its square kiva, likely built when the mission was in use by the Franciscans. Why would it have been built in this essentially Christian place of worship? How much were Christian beliefs and Pueblo beliefs mixed?
A maze of rooms off the corridor led from the public to the private areas of the convento.
The round shape of this kiva, located outside the church, was more familiar than the square one we'd viewed in the patio. However, in Tiwa pueblos, both square and round kivas are standard.
The Mission gardens were probably filled with fruit trees and bordered by an outer wall built for protection and to establish the mission boundaries. During attacks, people and livestock could be brought into the walled courtyard.
The streets and plazas at Quarai stood empty for over 140 years until Hispanic settlers returned to the Salinas district in the early 1800s. They often built a round watchtower called a torreón, as part of the fortifications protecting their settlements from Apache raids. A few bricks were all that remained of this torreón. Perhaps you recall the first torreón we came across in the Lincoln State Monument during the Lincoln County War, in which Billy the Kid was involved!
This arroyo, along with several nearby streams, played a critical role in the settlement and use of this valley. It was essential for both early native people and later Spaniards to settle near water to support a large pueblo in a dry land. The stream had long since dried up.
By the 1670s, the people of Quarai were suffering all the problems of drought, disease, famine, and hostile tribes that plagued Salinas Junction as a whole. The mission's doors were locked for the last time in 1677, with the last friar heading north with 200 Tiwa families to the mission at Tajique and then onto the Isleta mission to be with other Tiwa speakers.
After a long day, we were looking forward to stopping for the next few nights in Albuquerque, a city we'd only passed through previously and had never taken the time to explore. However, La Merced del Pueblo de Chilili caught our attention with signs declaring it to be a sovereign, self-governing entity, urging us to "Respect what we love."
I didn't understand the signs and found out that Chilili was a land grant community, which meant that it and other land grant areas had been awarded by Spain and Mexico from the late 17th to the mid-19th centuries to encourage settlement and create buffer zones against hostile Native American tribes. According to an online article in the Albuquerque Journal, the Chilili Land Grant was created in 1841 when the governor of the province granted land to 31 families living there.
More than a hundred years later, Chilili participated in the Chicano Movement, a political awakening for those of Mexican American descent that swept the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. As part of the movement, they fought for the restoration of land grants given to their ancestors by the Mexican government before it ceded western and southwestern portions of the country to the U.S. following the end of the Mexican-American War and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.
After some intense pushback against development, Chilili has its own flag, and their signs leave no doubt about the fierce protectiveness the people of the community still feel about their land and their way of life.
The breathtaking drive north along the Salt Missions Trail Scenic Byway into Albuquerque:
Next post: Albuquerque's Bio Park, Old Town & Downtown.
Posted on June 30th, 2025, from our home west of Denver and wishing all my Canadian family and friends Happy Canada Day tomorrow! How is it really possible that half the year has come and gone?! Take care of yourself and enjoy your time with loved ones.
