Los Luceros Hacienda

The retreat the panel ends on outlived its maker by decades of uncertain ownership. Wheelwright began buying the parcels in 1923 and held all of them by 1931, keeping Los Luceros until her death in 1958. The art collectors Charles and Nina Collier followed her, and the years after them were badly managed. In 1999 Frank and Anne Cabot, distant relations of hers, bought the place, and Casa Grande was restored in 2004. The state bought the 130 acres in 2008, and the legislature designated Los Luceros a state historic site in 2019.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Los Luceros Hacienda Los Luceros was the headquarters of Sebastían Martin Serrano's 1703 land grant, which ran five miles along the Rio Grande and 18 miles east to the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Martin planted an extensive apple orchard that survives today on a former Tewa agricultural site. With Casa Grande—a rare two-story adobe with a double wraparound veranda—a chapel, jailhouse, Victorian cottage, and guesthouse, Los Luceros is one of a few surviving territorial haciendas in New Mexico. The Rio Arriba County Courthouse from 1846 to 1854, Wheelwright Museum founder Mary Cabot Wheelwright bought the dilapidated property in 1923 and remodeled it into a retreat for artists and writers of the period.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• El Santuario de Chimayó — 9.2 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.
• Fuller Lodge — 22 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 — 27 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.
• San Francisco de Asís Church, Ranchos de Taos — 29 mi
  The adobe church at Ranchos de Taos that artists always paint from behind, kept standing by the mud its parish spreads over it every June.

More markers nearby

• Doña Margarita Martín — steps away
• Santa Cruz de la Cañada / Santa Cruz Plaza on the Camino Real — 8.3 mi
• Cordova — 10 mi
• The St. Francis Women's Club — 14 mi