El Rito

The Tewa people the panel names first built one of the largest towns in the Southwest about two miles from here. Sapawe, lived in from roughly 1350 to 1550, holds an estimated 1,820 ground-floor rooms and 23 kivas around seven plazas on some thirty acres of state land, and Adolph Bandelier called it the largest ruin in the Southwest. A University of New Mexico field school dug there in 1969; why its people left is still unknown. The village of El Rito came some three centuries later. Spray paint covers most of this panel.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ghost Ranch — 16 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.
• Rio Grande Gorge Bridge — 27 mi
  A steel truss strung across a slot in the basalt west of Taos, 565 feet above the river by the careful measure and 650 by the signs, built when the road beyond it did not yet exist.
• El Santuario de Chimayó — 28 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.

More markers nearby

• El Rito — 0.3 mi
• Abiquiú — 11 mi
• Agueda S. Martinez (1898-2000) — 12 mi
• Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) — 13 mi