Abiquiú

The genízaro town the panel names was the scene of New Mexico's largest witch hunt. Governor Tomás Vélez Cachupín placed genízaro families, people of Native birth taken captive and raised among Spaniards, on the Abiquiú grant in 1754 to buffer raids. From 1756 the friar Juan José Toledo, assigned to the new mission of Santo Tomás, began reporting devil worship among them, and investigations dragged on until 1766, with lists of accused witches and their supposed victims. In the end the Inquisition charged Toledo himself with heresy.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Abiquiú Established on the site of an abandoned Indian pueblo, Abiquiú in the mid-18th century became a settlement of Spaniards and genízaros (Hispanicized Indians). In 1776, explorers Fray Francisco Atanacio Dominguez and Fray Silvestre Vélez de Escalante visited here. In 1830, the settlement became one of the stops on the Spanish Trail which linked Santa Fe with Los Angeles, California.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ghost Ranch — 12 mi
  Red, yellow and white cliffs above the Piedra Lumbre basin, where Georgia O'Keeffe bought seven acres in 1940 and paleontologists found a hillside full of dinosaurs in 1947.
• Fuller Lodge — 23 mi
  The upright-log dining hall of a boys' ranch school, which fed and housed the Manhattan Project after the Army bought the school in 1942.
• El Santuario de Chimayó — 26 mi
  A small adobe shrine on the High Road to Taos, built around 1816 over earth that pilgrims still carry away in hope of healing.
• Valles Caldera National Preserve — 26 mi
  A crater thirteen miles across, floored with grass, left by an eruption 1.25 million years ago and owned privately for 140 years under a law that called it vacant land.

More markers nearby

• Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) — 3.7 mi
• Red Rocks — 3.7 mi
• Doña Margarita Martín — 18 mi
• Los Luceros Hacienda — 18 mi