El Rancho de las Golondrinas

The Ranch of the Swallows sits on land that served as an official rest stop, a paraje, on the Camino Real, the royal road connecting Mexico City to Santa Fe. The original colonial buildings on this site date to the eighteenth century, and in seventeen eighty the governor of New Mexico, Juan Bautista de Anza, stopped here with his expeditionary force and recorded the visit. For a century and a half the ranch supplied goods to the caravans traveling north, feeding and sheltering travelers in the last miles before Santa Fe.

Today it operates as a living history museum on five hundred acres with many historic buildings, where guides in period dress demonstrate weaving, blacksmithing, milling, and farming as they were practiced on the New Mexico frontier. The museum opened in nineteen seventy-two and now hosts festivals through the summer season, preserving the Spanish, Mexican, and Territorial eras of the Southwest in a working landscape.