"I strolled to an old mission garden..."

We are interested in the architecture of Spanish Missions, and wanted to see some of the examples in New Mexico, so we started the day with a visit to Isleta Pueblo, and their old mission church, which dates from the 1600's. The Pueblo itself has been occupied continuously since the 1300's.




A somewhat surreptitious picture of one of the little beehive shaped ovens everyone seemed to have in their backyard that are used to bake bread. Photography was allowed here (unlike most occupied pueblos), but we didn't want to be intrusive.



At a tiny gift shop in the pueblo, a woman was selling 'pumpkin pies', which were these sort of folded flat-bread things filled with pumpkin and raisins, and baked in those little ovens. They were quite tasty.


We took a New Mexico Scenic Byway called the Salt Mission Trail that passed through several tiny towns with funny little churches, all from the 1800's.



The weather was highly variable. This picture and the one above were taken about 20 minutes apart. This particular style of church was a favorite (down to the color of trim) and we saw several.






This is the Quarai section of Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument. These missions are obviously ruins; abandoned in the late 1600's mostly due to fierce aggression from non-Christian Indians. In addition to the mission itself, there were ruins of a large village nearby. One interesting thing at both this site and the next was the inclusion of a kiva in the architecture of the mission. There was no real explanation for this; the park service suggested that the kivas were built to help aid the transition to Christianity for the Indians. In later years though, Indians would have to pursue their traditional rituals in secret or risk whipping and such by the missionaries.



The structures were fortress-like.



These ruins are at the Abo section of Salinas, and were built and later abandoned under similar circumstances; with everyone leaving for safer quarters along the Rio Grande.






Socorro is one of the areas people ended up settling, and Mission San Miguel, still in use today, was built in the early 1600's, though it has been much modified over the years.


Click me to see where we went.