Santa Rosa: The Blue Hole and the City of Natural Lakes

Santa Rosa sits on the edge of the Pecos River valley in eastern New Mexico and calls itself the City of Natural Lakes, a name that surprises drivers crossing the dry Llano Estacado. The town sits atop an artesian system that surfaces in a series of clear blue sinkholes and ponds scattered around the townsite.

The most famous is the Blue Hole, a natural circular pool roughly eighty feet across at the surface and eighty feet deep, fed by a constant flow of sixty-one-degree water at three thousand gallons per minute. The clarity is extraordinary, and the Blue Hole has become one of the premier inland scuba diving sites in the southwestern United States. Route Sixty-Six gave Santa Rosa its highway identity in the nineteen thirties, and the road's main commercial strip once bustled with motor courts and diners. Today the Blue Hole draws a different kind of traveler, one who comes not to drive through but to go down.