The Healing Waters — Hot Springs at the Center of Everything

This town exists because of water that comes out of the ground hot. The geothermal springs here are heated deep underground by volcanic activity associated with the Rio Grande Rift, a zone where the earth's crust has been slowly pulling apart for tens of millions of years. The water rises hot, warm enough for comfortable soaking, and carries calcium, magnesium, sodium, and other dissolved minerals.

The springs do not emerge from a single source but from multiple points along the riverbank and beneath the streets of town, making the entire waterfront a geothermal zone. For as long as people have lived in this valley, those waters have drawn them here. The Mimbres people and later the Apache bands of the region knew the springs well.

The Chihenné Apaches, also called the Warm Springs Apaches, took one of their names from these waters, and local tradition holds that the springs were a sacred neutral ground where warring groups observed a truce in order to heal their wounded. The Spanish later passed through this part of New Mexico and found the springs in their already ancient role as a gathering place. American settlers in the early twentieth century built bathhouses along the riverbank and incorporated a town they called Hot Springs in nineteen sixteen.

By then the springs had been drawing visitors for commercial bathing purposes for several decades, with doctors recommending the mineral waters for arthritis, digestive ailments, and general exhaustion. The first public baths appeared in the late eighteen hundreds, and bathhouses multiplied after the town was founded. Today a cluster of small bathhouse businesses still operates along the Rio Grande waterfront, drawing visitors who come specifically for the soak.

The waters have not changed. Only the town around them has.