Laguna Pueblo
New Mexico
Laguna Pueblo sits forty-five miles west of Albuquerque and has been continuously occupied since at least thirteen hundred. The pueblo as it stands today took shape in sixteen ninety-nine, when Kawaik people and refugees from several other pueblos gathered here after the Pueblo Revolt and its aftermath. Spanish missionaries built the Mission San Jose de la Laguna between sixteen ninety-nine and seventeen oh one, and it still stands at the center of Old Laguna.
The pueblo is the largest of the Keresan language pueblos, covering land in four counties across half a million acres. When Route Sixty-Six was realigned in nineteen thirty-seven, it bypassed Pecos, Santo Domingo, Sandia and Isleta but stayed on Laguna, leaving it the only major pueblo still visible from the highway. Travel writer Jack Rittenhouse noted it in his nineteen forty-six guidebook as something worth stopping for.
