Zuni Pueblo
The Largest Of The Nineteen New Mexico Pueblos And A Sovereign Nation Of Roughly 10,000 People; Visitors Enter On A Permit From The Zuni Tourism Office, And The Zuni Cibola Complex Is A National Historic Landmark · Zuni, New Mexico
Zuni is the largest of the nineteen pueblos in New Mexico, a sovereign nation of about 10,000 people speaking a language with no known relatives anywhere, on land they have occupied continuously for something like seven hundred years. This is where Coronado's expedition arrived in 1540 looking for the Seven Cities of Cibola and found stone villages instead of gold. The middle village, Halona:Idiwan'a, is the old core, and the mission church of Our Lady of Guadalupe inside it carries something genuinely unusual: interior walls covered floor to ceiling with life-size Zuni kachina figures, painted by a Zuni artist over decades, in a Catholic church. Zuni is known well beyond New Mexico for needlepoint and inlay silverwork and for carved stone fetishes, most of it made in family workshops in the village. Visiting is by permit from the tribal tourism office and the rules are the pueblo's own.
1239 NM Highway 53, Zuni, Zuni, New Mexico, 87327, United States
The Zuni Tourism office and visitor centre keep daytime hours on weekdays and shorter hours at weekends, and all visiting is arranged through them. Guided walks of the middle village and the Our Lady of Guadalupe mission run on request through the day rather than on a fixed timetable. The village closes to visitors entirely for ceremonial periods, including around Shalako in late autumn, and those closures are announced with little notice.