Cerrillos: Turquoise Capital of the Ancient Southwest

The small village of Cerrillos, in this desert hollow, stands on some of the oldest mining ground in North America, and the reason is under your feet. The hills here are laced with turquoise, and for centuries before Spanish contact the Pueblo peoples mined this stone and traded it across the entire American Southwest, into Mexico, and as far as the Mississippi Valley. Turquoise from Cerrillos has been found in ancient sites hundreds of miles away.

When the Spanish arrived in the fifteen hundreds they added silver and lead mining to the mix, and Cerrillos became a scrappy mining town that drew fortune seekers through the colonial and territorial eras. In the eighteen eighties, during the silver boom, it was a rowdy boomtown that rivaled Santa Fe, not far to the north. The boom faded, and Cerrillos shrank to the quiet, photogenic village it is today. The mines are mostly quiet now, but the turquoise hills remain, still some of the richest deposits in North America.