Tracing 17th-Century Spain's “Royal Road of the Interior Lands"
By Barbara 'Bo' Jensen
I’m trying to get to the old plaza, driving through the narrow streets of Taos, New Mexico. I’ve been imagining a leisurely stroll under the porticos, browsing the colorful paintings and hand-woven rugs, looking out at the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. But orange construction barrels block off the torn-up intersection and all but one lane, forcing me to turn right, away from my destination. I glance left as I am herded north; the back way into the plaza looks equally chaotic, slabs of broken concrete exposing the strata of rock and dirt underneath.
Never mind, I decide.
Río Grande del Norte National Monument
Allowing the road to lead me, I pass the Taos Pueblo and cruise out to the bridge over the river gorge at Rio Grande del Norte National Monument. I park my car at the rest area, walking out onto the windswept quarter-mile-long bridge to a pedestrian overlook some 800 feet above the Rio Grande River churning below. It’s an impressive place to begin my journey: to follow the New Mexico stretch of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail, 17th-century Spain’s “Royal Road of the Interior Lands,” which traced the Rio Grande northward from Mexico City to this sage-covered mesa surrounding me.
We typically think of American settlement and expansion from east to west. The southwestern part of our country, however, was explored and settled by the Spanish from south to north. Or rather, re-settled — the archaeological record shows people have been living in the Rio Grande Valley for at least 12,000 years.
Roads are built in layers, one atop the next. The Royal Road north was made by following in the footsteps of those who had gone before, widening and improving ancient footpaths already established along the river between Indigenous communities. When Hernán Cortés and the Spanish conquistadors conquered the Aztecs in 1521, they established the capital of New Spain — Mexico City — right on the site of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán. In 1598, when Juan de Oñate led Spanish explorers farther up the Rio Grande into what is now northern New Mexico, he encountered multiple active pueblos that were well over 200 years old. Discovery is often the act of rediscovery.
Taking The High Road
The road to Taos was explored by the Spanish and deemed nearly impassible, 25 miles of bad road between Picuris Pueblo and Taos Pueblo. Therefore, a northern provincial capital was chosen just below the rough patch, first at Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo (renamed San Juan Pueblo by Juan Oñate himself), and later moved to the new villa real, or royal city, called Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asis, “The Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi,” shortened to simply Santa Fe.
It's that same rough road I decide to take — now known as the High Road to Taos, one of the most enchanting scenic byways in the state. Leaving Taos, I wind southwest toward Santa Fe, through pastoral Chamisal and Trampas, edging past the stunning cliffs of Truchas, before descending into Chimayó. Here, El Santuario de Chimayó, a small adobe church and shrine designated a National Historic Landmark, receives over 300,000 pilgrims each year, believers in miraculous healing attributed to the site. Tewa Indians had originally named the place Tsi-Mayoh for the sacred hill located behind where the church sits now, one of four sacred hills in the area they believed were inhabited by supernatural beings whose healing spirits were accessible in hot springs found there; as the hot springs in this location dried up, the spirits left their healing powers in the soil, the holy dirt of Chimayó.
It would be nice to think that these layers of beliefs were easily welcomed and assimilated. However, traveling on to Santa Fe, places like the famed Palace of the Governors remind me of how the Tewa and other Pueblo people were persecuted and brutalized by the Spanish in their quest to convert the Indians to Christianity. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 marks the violent uprising by the Pueblo people, temporarily driving the Spanish completely out of New Mexico. But just 12 years later, in 1692, the Spanish returned north with troops sufficient to reconquer New Mexico. The Santa Fe Fiesta, established in 1712 and dubbed “the nation’s oldest community celebration” by Tourism Santa Fe, annually commemorates the Reconquista and the dominion of the Spanish Empire here for the next 130 years. Not everyone celebrated, then or now. The Fiesta remains controversial.
As if on cue, orange road construction barrels appear along my road out of the city. My lane choices narrow. So many barriers, even as people think they’re making improvements.
Entering The Rio Grande Valley
Driving south on I-25, the wide interstate highway wends its way through the last of the Santa Fe hills and onto a broad mesa, toward — then suddenly down over — an astonishing 600-foot escarpment. La Bajada: “The Descent.” This massive bluff marks the Royal Road’s division between the upper Rio Grande (Rio Arriba) and the lower (Rio Abajo). The Descent is smooth and easy today, newly paved. However, at the historic location above Cochiti Pueblo, you can still follow the steep switchbacks, a rocky dirt road once allowing wagons and carts to continue down El Camino Real loaded with goods to be delivered to the Spanish viceroy in Mexico City.
The viceroy’s name: don Francisco Fernández de la Cuerva Enríquez, Duke of Alburquerque (the first “r” dropped somewhere along the way). The acting provincial governor of the Rio Abajo area may have been hoping to drop the “acting” status of his position by founding a villa in 1706 named for the duke. He sited this new villa where the old Trujillo ranch had been located…prior to the Spanish colonist’s ranch being destroyed during the revolt.
An 18th century cross carved by Spanish shepherds into a rock now found in Petroglyph National Monument/Barbara Jensen
A city built over a burned-out ranch built on the displacement and death of the Native Americans — people forced to labor for the Spanish, while enduring drought that led to famine, magnifying the impact of deadly new diseases carried up El Camino Real.
According to Following the Royal Road by Professor Hal Jackson, “When Coronado entered New Mexico in 1540, about one hundred thousand natives resided in some one hundred pueblos. In 1600, when Oñate brought his settlers, pueblo numbers were already down to eighty-one and the population to sixty thousand. … The decline continued until, in 1680, the year the Pueblo Revolt began, the numbers were thirty-one pueblos and fifteen thousand population. … Just after the reconquest, 1706, the numbers were nine thousand Indians living in nineteen pueblos, mostly the pueblos we see today. The Spanish entrada had truly been a catastrophe for the Indians of New Mexico.”
Welcome to Albuquerque
The colorful welcome sign greets me, depicting a city silhouette on a blue river in front of the lavender Sandia Mountains, the ever-present yellow hot air balloons ascending. Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, the National Hispanic Cultural Center — these nearby institutions offer artifacts and narratives from multiple perspectives. Yet, for a few quiet minutes, I stand in the tree-shaded grass at Martineztown Park. Located directly on El Camino Real, Martineztown was a paraje, a rest area along the trail. I walk the huge cartwheel design in its cement plaza, each spoke a significant date, a transfer of power, of ownership, of nationality, each event rolling over the history that came before. The weight of it all feels crushing.
How not to forget, yet keep traveling along? I stop at Petroglyph National Monument, maybe seeking some kind of ancestor wisdom, old images made by ancient hands, preserved in rock. Ranger Rachel provides cheery, upbeat relief. She happily steers me toward Boca Negra Canyon, where I hike up short, easy trails to see beautiful carved images in the archaic Rio Grande style — birds, mountain lions, and snakes; masked human figures, flute players, dancers; mysterious spirals and four-pointed stars. And Christian crosses, “done in the patriarchal style, with two horizontals both ending in crosslets” according to a trail sign, probably made by Spanish shepherds in the 1700s or so.
Who made the footprints, handprints, I found? Which images, which history, belong here? People have carved their own relevance into these cliff walls for millennia.
Rocks And Rough Road
El Cerro de Tomé is a 400-foot hill and revered Camino Real landmark between Los Lunas and Belen. Here I find “La Puerta del Sol,” a rusted steel sculpture depicting trail travelers from various eras, installed in 1997 by Armando Alvarez Compean, a naturalized American artist born in Mexico City who lived in New Mexico. How fitting. His work sits below boulders with pre-contact petroglyph images; a calvario of three crosses erected on the hill’s summit; and a carefully arranged spiral of white stones, some 20 feet across, just below the crosses. The layers of perspective here, beliefs and values, old and new, shift and reform like the sculpture.
Not so at the Abó Ruins at Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument near Mountainair. Here, crumbling mission walls remind me that Spanish Catholic priests, following behind Oñate, believed they had found the true wealth to be claimed in New Mexico: the souls of the Indigenous people. Converts hand-built the stone and adobe missions for Franciscan friars. Still, many Salinas Pueblo people also continued their masked Kachina dances and kiva rituals. Local governors, seeking to increase their workforce, fostered assimilation by initially allowing both Indian and Christian practices to coexist. But the Spanish Inquisition reached across the ocean and into New Mexico, and any Spaniards encouraging Native religious practices soon risked terrible consequences.
Abó Ruins, Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument/Barbara Jensen
I think about the Inquistion as I continue south, passing through two huge wildlife refuges, first Sevilleta, and later Bosque del Apache. Beyond here lies the 80-mile Jornada del Muerto, often translated as “Dead Man’s Journey.” A story is told of Bernardo Gruber, a German trader living in New Mexico, accused of witchcraft in 1670 by the local Holy Office of the Inquisition. Fleeing torture, he died in this waterless desert east of the refuges.
Refuges for animals, but not for people. I exit I-25 to take a loop on Alemán (“German”) Road, stopping at the Yost Escarpment and Point of Rocks. Maybe it’s the late afternoon sun, but I struggle to see these trail landmarks as unique. This volcanic region holds numerous rocky outcroppings and low bluffs. I don’t know if I could have found my way through this desperate crossing, carrying the oppressive weight of enough water to last a week.
The unimaginable burden of survival. I return to the sun-baked interstate, but not gladly. I’m on edge because as I travel I-25 beyond Truth or Consequences, I know what I will see — a Border Patrol checkpoint, a good 80 miles north of the U.S./Mexico border, well before I even reach Las Cruces. U.S. Border Patrol can have checkpoints up to 100 miles within the border, though I have never seen such a thing on the Canadian line.
It may be technically legal, but it’s not right. I haven’t crossed any borders. I’m frustrated: I have the right to travel freely between states, let alone from the north to the south end of my own state. It’s easy to argue that stopping briefly at an “inland” checkpoint is not unreasonable in terms of search and seizure — if you don’t mind being searched. But it can’t be effective or accurate; it’s subjective and racist, in my repeated experience.
After hundreds of years and layers of government immigration policies, this is the sorry road we have built? It feels nearly impassable.
Another Day On The Royal Road
It’s a new day. Returning north from the old Mesilla Plaza outside of Las Cruces, I’m trying to keep the memory of its gentle church bell in my mind this morning as I slow for the checkpoint. It’s unavoidable; all the highways out of Las Cruces have these gates. No orange barrels here, but the lanes funnel me exactly where I do not want to go. Cameras point at me from all angles as I come to a reluctant stop. Signs remind me there are drug-sniffing dogs on duty, big German shepherds, typically.
The uniformed officer is berating a young brown man in the car stopped ahead of me, a sports car with tinted windows. The officer makes a big show of repeatedly comparing the registration to the back license plate, talking loudly all the while. Minutes pass. I sigh, but I do not move in the slightest. He finally barks something at the young man and lets him drive off. As I pull forward, to my right I see another, even younger brown man, parked. Eyes wide. Waiting.
I reach the stop sign, my driver’s window rolled down. All my windows are tinted. Living in New Mexico, nearly everyone’s windows are tinted against the sun’s harsh glare. I’m wearing dark sunglasses. My backseat is full of travel gear, a sleeping bag, multiple jugs of water.
The officer takes half a glance inside my car and mutters, “Have a good day,” waving me forward before I’ve even come to a complete stop.
I am not a young brown man.
I have just gotten the royal treatment on El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro — and I am furious about it. Call it road rage. Travel the Royal Road at your own risk. Because I don’t think Americans are planning to revolt against this treatment any time soon.
