El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro is a nearly 500-year-old route in New Mexico and part of a 1,600-mile international road from Mexico City north to Santa Fe. Known as the Royal Road to the Interior Lands, it became one of North America's most famous early roads and today is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Mexico and a National Historic Trail in the U.S. For centuries, people traveled and traded along this riverside route, exchanging buffalo hides, pinon nuts, turquoise, obsidian, wool, food, clothing, languages, religious and spiritual beliefs, architecture, music, art, ideas about property and society, and diseases from Europe. Pueblo people cultivated, ate, and traded maize long before the Spanish arrived, while Spanish colonists introduced churro sheep, horses, metal swords, body armor, and metal tools, bringing profound changes to the region. Spanish explorers, soldiers, and priests moved into the interior of North America from the middle 1500s seeking wealth, royal favor, and the spread of Spanish culture and Roman Catholicism, with mixed and sometimes violent results, and within 100 years of Spanish contact most large pueblos had a Spanish mission and priests, while some Ancestral Pueblo people blended their own beliefs with Christianity. By 1650, goods on El Camino Real might be bound for the next village, Mexico City, or Europe. In 1598 Juan de Onate led 400 settlers north from Zacatecas, Mexico, extending the road at least 600 miles into present-day New Mexico to establish Spanish colonies in the interior. The route also included dangerous stretches such as the Jornada del Muerto, a nearly waterless desert crossing that could be deadly for unprepared travelers, including settlers fleeing the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.