The physical legacy of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro is imprinted across the New Mexico landscape in the form of trail tracks, wagon ruts and lengthy swales that appear and disappear in the dirt like wandering ghosts of time.
El Camino Real in Doña Ana is now paved and peaceful, but when Doña Ana was established under the Mexican government in 1843, life in New Mexico was anything but calm. Persistent attacks by Apache and Comanche raiders had since the 1598 Spanish colonization of the province prevented permanent settlement of the Rio Grande valley between El Paso del Norte and Tomé.
Somewhere along the meandering 1 ½-mile interpretive path that follows parts of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro to Yost Draw, a visitor may begin to wonder what he or she is doing in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto—the Journey of the Dead Man.
The gritty crunch of footsteps on gravel, a dull desert buzz and the gentle flap of an American flag inspire a visitor to imagine the ghostly Fort Craig as a fully occupied U.S. Army garrison on the middle Rio Grande route of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro.
Today, Fort Selden stands as a ghost of itself and their memories in the shadow of the soft-curving Robledo Mountains, whose name honors the fate of Pedro Robledo, a member of the 1598 Juan de Oñate expedition and the first European to die on El Camino Real in what is now the United States.
Mesquite Historic District eclectic collection of homes and small businesses reflects the pioneering spirits of those who set down roots along the southerly path of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, then known as the Chihuahua Trail, after the Mexican-American War.
A lone hawk circles over El Cerro de Tomé (Tomé Hill) on a breezy, blue-sky morning. Its black basalt slopes rising 400 feet above the Rio Grande floodplain, 10 miles south of Isleta Pueblo, Tomé Hill marks a dramatic break in the flat landscape, drawing both the bird’s-eye view and the interest of visitors below.
The Rio Grande bosque (woodlands) and the Sandia Mountains lie just beyond Kuaua Ruins, a prehistoric Tiwa village that was one of the largest Pueblo Indian settlements in the region at the time of the 1540 expedition of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado.
The Rio Grande bosque (woodlands) and the Sandia Mount
In 1598, when 50-year-old Juan de Oñate took on the task of colonizing New Spain’s northern frontier for the Spanish Crown, he was given a peculiar order to survey New Mexico’s harbors and coastlines. As soon as he set foot on New Mexican soil, he realized the only waterway in sight was the Rio Grande.
In September 1693, a group of hopeful soldiers and colonists—including priests, weavers, tailors, stonecutters, brick masons, carpenters, millers, ironworkers, shoemakers, a sculptor and two painters—departed Mexico City for a new life in the distant Spanish land of New Mexico.
Constructed between 1877 and 1882, the iconic chapel at
San Elizario’s former military presidio was the fourth chapel
built after the presidio’s establishment in 1788.
Learn about Ysleta Mission, one of the longest continually
occupied religious buildings in the United States. It is the
spiritual center of the only Indian Pueblo in Texas.
Wandering the laid-back streets of the San Elizario Historic District in Texas, one finds it hard to imagine the place as an action-packed crossroads of culture, commerce and military affairs. Yet in the 18th and 19th centuries, San Elizario’s adobe embrace held more than the charming air of history it exudes today.
