Spanish New Mexico and the Camino Real

In the spring of sixteen ten, a Spanish governor named Pedro de Peralta ordered the construction of a new capital for the province of Nuevo México. He chose a site at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where a small river came down from the hills. He called the place La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís, the Royal Town of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi.

Santa Fe would become the oldest continuously occupied state capital in what is now the United States. It was the northern terminus of the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the Royal Road of the Interior Lands, a supply route that stretched about sixteen hundred miles south to Mexico City. Roughly every three years, a supply caravan would make the journey north, carrying cloth, tools, sacramental wine, and settlers.

The trip took months and crossed some of the most brutal terrain on the continent, including a ninety-mile waterless stretch through the Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of the Dead Man, in southern New Mexico. The Spanish had first entered the region in fifteen forty when Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led an expedition north from Mexico searching for the mythical Seven Cities of Gold. He found instead the Pueblo towns of the Rio Grande valley, which were real and remarkable but offered no treasure.

Permanent colonization came in fifteen ninety-eight under Don Juan de Oñate, who crossed the Rio Grande at a ford still marked today near El Paso. New Mexico was never a rich colony. It produced no silver, no sugar, no great plantation crops.

Its Spanish settlers, fewer than three thousand by the mid-seventeenth century, survived by trade with the Pueblos, by ranching, and by a system of forced Pueblo labor that would eventually cost them everything in the revolt of sixteen eighty. But the Spanish left a deep imprint: the acequia irrigation system still waters fields throughout the Rio Grande valley; the adobe architecture of New Mexico is a direct inheritance from the colonial period; and the Spanish language spoken in isolated northern villages preserves forms that have vanished everywhere else.