Spanish Ruins

I like to think of myself as fairly well-traveled and worldly. It's arrogant, I know, but there are some good reasons I think of myself this way: I've set foot on six of the seven (or eight, depending on who you believe or choose to believe) continents on our planet; I was born in one continent and live in another; and I've made a point of learning about the history and culture of the places I've traveled when I set foot away from home. I don't just go to the tourist-y parts of wherever I'm headed. I seek out the "real" experiences. This all makes me feel somewhat superior. It's obnoxious and egomaniacal but sometimes I feel this way.

Then every so often, something happens that yanks me back to reality and reminds me that I'm not that special after all and that I carry just as many biases that distort my worldview as most every other person on the planet. That "something" happened again last month when we were in New Mexico.

So, I'll admit it: my view of the history of the settlement of the United States is sometimes lazy. I don't mean the fact that there were people here before European people arrived here for good in the late 1400s. I get that there have been indigenous people in North and South America for thousands of years and that they were as diverse as the landscape of the New World (there I go again convincing myself I'm worldly...).

No. My lazy and very east coast view of the settlement of our country (and I can't believe I'm going to write this) is that Europeans landed on the eastern shore of what would later become the United States and settled generally westward. Yes, I know that there were missionaries and Californios out on the west coast before the USA claimed all the territory between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans south of Canada and north of Mexico. But it's not like it's pre-Revolutionary War type history or anything like that, right? Right?

By the way, that part about the "real" experiences on my travels. I'm sure I'm kidding myself about that too.

The remains of the Spanish mission church at Quarai. Construction started in 1627.

St. Augustine, Florida was founded in 1565. It is the oldest, continuously-inhabited, European-established settlement in the United States. The Roanoke Colony, the first permanent English settlement in the new world, was founded in 1585 in what is now North Carolina. And how about those pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. They famously landed on these shores in Massachusetts in 1620. And from there, everything spread west, right? 13 colonies, Declaration of Independence, Revolutionary War, Louisiana Purchase, Mexican-American War, Manifest Destiny, Alaska, Hawaii. Isn't that the history of the settlement of our country, in pretty much that order?

It is not. Spanish conquistadors explored what is now New Mexico in 1541. 1541!!!! The first Spanish settlement in our 47th state was founded in 1598. Santa Fe was established in 1610. Europeans have been in New Mexico almost 500 years. Before St. Augustine. Before the Roanoke Colony. Before Plymouth Rock. They came. They built. They brought disease, destruction, death and enslavement. And they left ruins. We thought it might be worthwhile traveling into the New Mexico desert to find some of them.

The second church at Gran Quivira. Construction started in 1659.

Maybe a few words about the Spanish colonization of the New World are in order.

The Spanish were not complicated explorers when it came to the settlement of the Western Hemisphere. Their objectives were fairly simple: (1) convert any indigenous people they encountered to Catholicism and (2) find treasure. Lots of treasure. And if it appeared that there was no treasure or the locals weren't giving up its location, they weren't above some pretty harsh measures. Nor, in some cases, were the priests who were bringing religion to the natives when Jesus didn't take. Not that the natives weren't religious (they were) but they weren't the RIGHT religion in the view of the Spanish Crown.

To spread religion (and kill and rob those possessing the treasure), the Spanish sent two kinds of people into the future New Mexico wilderness: priests and soldiers. Sending soldiers into foreign lands was a tried and true model for the Spanish. It worked with the Aztecs and it worked with the Incas. The Aztecs had tons of gold. The Incas had tons of gold. Their forays into New Mexico would just tweak that model a bit. But surely, all indigenous people in the New World had tons of gold. And they would get the added bonus of the Spanish bringing God with them. No, no, not the existing gods. The REAL God.

The remains of the mission church at Abó, completed in 1651.

What the Spanish found when they started exploring New Mexico was (for the most part) a settled, agricultural society (without gold). They found people living in towns (the Spanish called them pueblos) three, four and five stories high and farming, hunting and collectively pitching in to make the whole thing work. Pottery, cooking, artwork, clothes making, trading, whatever was required to make the entire operation run smoothly. So the Spanish did the only thing that made sense to them: they settled right next to the pueblos. After all, if you wanted to convert people to your religion, you needed to be near to the people you wanted to convert.

I'm not going to lionize the Spanish priests sent into the wilderness in the New World because, God knows (and yes, there's some irony there) they were often unnecessarily cruel in their dealings with native populations. But I will say (and this is with or without soldiers) that the prospect of being sent into a completely alien land where you might meet hostile people willing to kill you at a moment's notice would have terrified me.

And I have to say, the landscapes these priests and soldiers traveled through and over 400 years ago can't look that much different than where we drove last month. The New Mexico desert, stretching for as far as the eye can see dotted with piñon and juniper and yucca and terminating in mesas and mountains, is both extremely gorgeous and completely remote. The first time I drove through New Mexico in 2001 I thought it would be easy to understand what the landscape looked like before the arrival of man because all you would have to do is remove the one road I was traveling on. I felt the same way last month.

Our quest for Spanish ruins in the New Mexico desert (because that's exactly what it boiled down to) centered around two National Park Service properties: the three-site Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument south of Albuquerque and Pecos National Historical Park south and east of Santa Fe. There is value in visiting both properties.

A rough ride down New Mexico 41.

There is also great value in actually getting there. The New Mexico desert is for sure (and I realize I just said this) a place to behold. The amount of nothingness set against sky is stunning. They call Montana the big sky country. I've been to Montana and I'll take New Mexico's sky over that of Montana any day. One of the most extraordinary hours we spent in New Mexico last month was a 50 minute or so drive southbound down New Mexico 41 in the direction of Salinas Pueblo Missions dodging and mostly hitting hundreds of tumbleweeds rolling across the road in the desert wind. And I'm not exaggerating with the hundreds. There were continuous tumbleweeds rolling across the road for the better part of an hour.

Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument consists of three sites that the Spanish visited and settled in the 1600s. The three parts of the Park (Gran Quivira, Quarai and Abò) are centered around the town of Mountainair, NM. I guess it's the closest town that's about equidistant between the three sites and it's pretty much in the middle of nowhere. There's one stop light and a series of storefronts (not all open for business) on one side of the street that can't be more than a quarter of a mile long. Just west of Mountainair there are a series of salt lakes (las salinas - and hence the name of the National Monument) which at one time would have represented a source of some wealth, particularly interior to the nation. Easier to extract the salt from somewhere close than travel to the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico.

A couple of notes about the Park. First, Gran Quivira is remote. Like really, really remote. There was nobody else there when we arrived and that remained the same throughout our visit. No rangers, no visitors, no cell phone service, no nothing, although the bathroom was thankfully open. It's been a while since I've been that far out into nothingness (although that experience would get surpassed like the very next day). However, as a place to learn about the Spanish and the native pueblos already there before the Spanish, I found it lacking. There clearly at one time was a significantly sized settlement here but today, it's mostly a series of low foundations and a ruined church made from stone that's as pale (but just a bit whiter) than the grass in the surrounding desert.

I felt similarly about Quarai. The church at that site is a lot more intact but the property sits in a hollow which tends to divorce the site from the desert a little. One of the ideas I wanted to explore was that the hand of man and the ruins long left behind could actually enhance the beauty of the desert by highlighting the natural beauty of the landscape against something non-natural. I didn't get that sense at either Gran Quivira or Quarai.

Abó, with the old church fragments in the foreground and the Mazano Mountains behind.

But if there's a bit of a letdown in the sites at Gran Quivira and Quarai, there is a great payoff at Abó. All three sites were abandoned in the 1660s or 1670s, likely due to drought and raids from the neighboring Apache people. When the natives (and the Spanish) fled Gran Quivira and Quarai, most of them came to Abó, only to leave that site about 10 years later.

The church at Abó, while not as intact as the one at Quarai, appears to be the largest of the churches at the three sites and the integration of Spanish and native religion is visible via a couple of kivas (underground chambers used for religious ceremonies in the pueblos) built right into the church footprint. While the site does not have much of the pueblo itself excavated, it does have a good walking trail that gets you a lot of different looks at the site and the gorgeous Manzano Mountains. This is the type of site I wanted to experience: a place with obvious history set against an amazing natural backdrop.

If there were a site at Salinas Pueblo Missions that I were to ever want to return to, it would be Abó.

The Spanish church at Pecos pueblo, circa 1625. That big sky...

But before there was Salinas Pueblo Missions, there was Pecos National Historical Park. Well, at lest that's how it worked for us anyway. Visiting Pecos was one of the best things we did on this trip

If I was hoping to find a site that had some intact Spanish ruins at a native American site where you could understand the magnitude of their construction efforts set against a just unbelievably gorgeous landscape of the New Mexican desert (and I clearly was by the way...), Pecos is it. The site is compact enough to walk comprehensively in less than two hours while also having enough to hold your interest all the way along. 

The site at Pecos is spectacular. The old pueblo was built in a spot called Glorieta Mesa which is high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and it overlooks pretty much about everything in the surrounding landscape. It's easy to see from a defensive standpoint why people would establish a settlement there. You can see anyone coming from miles away, I'm sure. It's also situated near a source of water (the nearby Glorieta Creek) and near a travel route through the mountains (Glorieta Pass) which made it a perfect place to facilitate trade of goods from people living to both the north and south. 

But beyond its strategic importance, the natural geography of the location is one of the prettiest places we visited in a week in New Mexico. The views both of the rolling high desert and vistas to the mountains and the mesas in the distance highlight two of my favorite features of the New Mexican landscape.

Ruins of the pueblo at Pecos National Historical Park.

I also found the ruined church at Pecos to be the most intact and picturesque of the four churches. It appears as a true adobe church, unlike the other three that are clearly built of stone. It is unclear to me whether the National Park Service re-coats the remains of the church periodically or if it's just sort of melted away in the infrequent New Mexico rains over however many decades the Park Service has been its custodian. Either way, it appears the way I want (here I go with my lazy views again...) an adobe church to appear. 

The church is also way more there and understandable than the ones at the three Salinas Pueblo Missions sites. By that I mean that you can walk into the ruins and understand what it might be like to move through the church before it became a ruin. There's enough there vertically (and way more than particularly at Gran Quivira and Abó) that you can understand what the church might have felt like the three to four hundred years ago that it stood intact.

The church at Pecos National Historical Monument, with a kiva in the foreground.

Ironically (and perhaps this was the most disappointing aspect of the visits), none of the four sites really conveyed the true scale of construction of the pueblos themselves. There were signs at more than one of the properties noting that the pueblos were constructed several stories high but the ruins at all four sites were barely visible above grade. Pecos was as deficient in this regard as the three sites at Salinas Pueblo Missions, but it also offered two advantages over the other sites. 

First, a section of the walking trail at Pecos takes you into an interior courtyard of the old pueblo with ruins of buildings visible on all sides. It was the first place on this trip we could start to understand just what it might be like to be inside an intact pueblo. I could start to imagine what a day might be like for the people who lived there all those hundreds of years ago. It wouldn't be the last time or the best site, but it would be the only time I really felt this way at a site where the Spanish had built adjacent the native structures. 

Second, Pecos has two reconstructed kivas (underground circular religious cermonial spaces), complete with ladders to allow you to enter. I'd visited a number of native American sites both on this trip and before this trip and had never had the opportunity to climb down into one of these ceremonial spaces. I know it's a reconstruction but they were surprisingly spacious and the light coming into the space from the small opening in the top was more than enough to light the whole place. I can imagine a religious ceremony in such a space would be an intimate experience. I appreciate the fact that Pecos had these kivas available and accessible, particularly on a day when there were so few people in the Park.

Pecos is a super quick drive from Santa Fe. It took us just a little more than a half an hour to get there. So way less remote than a place like Gran Quivira or the other two parts of Salinas Pueblo Missions. And it gave me exactly what I wanted from this part of our trip: some sense of how the pueblos built before the Spanish arrived while also getting a good and close look at what the missionaries built in New Mexico, all in one of the most spectacular natural settings we found all week. Plus it (along with the other three sites we visited) re-set my biased view of how this country of ours was settled. I won't forget that again. 

Until the next time I get lazy, that is.

Either way, I appreciated this part of the trip for its connection to the past and for getting us out into the nothingness of New Mexico.

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How We Did It

Getting to both Pecos National Historical Park and Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument is fairly straightforward. Plug either site into your navigation app of choice and follow the directions. Pecos is a bit more than a 30 minute drive from Santa Fe; Salinas Pueblo Missions is definitely at least an hour from Albuquerque. Note that Salinas Pueblo Missions is spread amongst four sites, the three historical sites plus the Visitor Center in Mountainair. Driving between the two sites farthest from each other (Gran Quivira and Abó) is probably a 45 minute drive by itself.

There's a small museum in the Visitor Center at Pecos detailing the history of the site, which involves way more than just the native peoples plus the Spanish. Glorieta Mesa saw action as part of the Santa Fe Trail and as a Civil War battlefield. The gift store at the Visitor Center is also awesome.

I don't know what's in the visitor centers at any of the Salinas Pueblo Missions visitor centers because all four were closed when we visited. There is a big difference in the operating hours of these sites' visitor centers between winter and summer. The main Visitor Center in Mountainair plus the ones at Abo and Quarai are open during winter but not on Tuesday or Wednesday, when we happened to visit.

Finally, and very important, admission to all five sites discussed in this post is free.

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