Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument
National Monument · Mountainair, New Mexico
This is one monument in three pieces, spread around the small town of Mountainair on the edge of the Estancia basin, and the first thing to understand is that you drive between them. Abo, Quarai and Gran Quivira were Tompiro and Tiwa pueblos trading salt from the lake beds that gave the district its name, and in the seventeenth century Franciscans built mission churches beside each of them, in red sandstone at Abo and Quarai and grey limestone at Gran Quivira. The walls still stand to a remarkable height - some of the finest colonial ruins in the Southwest. Then drought, Apache raiding, disease and the demands of the missions themselves emptied all three by about 1678, two years before the Pueblo Revolt, and the whole district was abandoned. Nobody resettled it, which is why so much survives. Quarai is the pleasantest of the three, under cottonwoods with a spring; Gran Quivira is the largest and has no shade at all; Abo is the closest to the highway. All three are free, and the visitor centre is in Mountainair rather than at any of them.
105 South Ripley Avenue, Mountainair, New Mexico, 87036, United States
Main visitor center and ruin sites open daily 9 AM - 5 PM (summer), 9 AM - 4 PM (winter).
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