Cordova

No panel stands here now. In the only photographs, taken in 2011, the frame on NM 76 west of the village holds nothing but its routed header. The woodcarving the lost panel credited began with grief: when the Army drafted his son Nicudemos in 1917, the farmer and carpenter José Dolores López took up whittling against sleepless nights. Encouraged in the 1920s by Frank Applegate and the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, he stopped painting and chip-carved his saints in bare aspen and cedar, a style his son George and granddaughter Gloria López Córdova carried on.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• El Santuario de Chimayó — 2.0 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.
• Palace of the Governors — 22 mi
  The long adobe on the north side of the Santa Fe plaza, called the oldest public building in continuous use in the country, though its own founding date is in dispute.
• Fuller Lodge — 24 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.
• Bandelier National Monument — 26 mi
  Rooms carved into soft volcanic tuff in Frijoles Canyon, named for a Swiss scholar who was led there in 1880 by a man from Cochiti Pueblo.

More markers nearby

• The St. Francis Women's Club — 8.1 mi
• Santa Cruz de la Cañada / Santa Cruz Plaza on the Camino Real — 8.6 mi
• Doña Margarita Martín — 10 mi
• Los Luceros Hacienda — 10 mi