Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument

In central New Mexico near Mountainair, Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument preserves the ruins of three Spanish mission complexes at Quarai, Abó, and Gran Quivira within an older Pueblo homeland of trade settlements, pueblos, and kivas built by Tiwa- and Tompiro-speaking people. Franciscan missionaries began constructing churches there in 1622, completing them by 1635, but by the late 1670s both Pueblo residents and Spaniards had left the Salinas District. The surviving ruins record early contact between Pueblo communities and Spanish colonists, the rise and collapse of a colonial frontier, and a lasting history of exchange, missionization, and abandonment in the seventeenth century Southwest.

Deer Canyon, New Mexico · United States