Pueblo of Santo Domingo Kiua

The worst of the panel's floods has a date. In June 1886 the Rio Grande rose past the pueblo's levees; the people carried the church doors, paintings and statues out before the water took the mission, built between 1740 and 1760, along with its cemetery, leaving a steep bank where they had stood. The village was rebuilt in long blocks of adobe houses along a wide central street, and a new church went up at the edge of the pueblo around 1890. Zebulon Pike had admired the lost church's paintings on his way south in 1807.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Pueblo of Santo Domingo Kiua The Keresan people of Santo Domingo have occupied this area of the Rio Grande Valley since prehistoric times despite several floods that have forced relocation and reconstruction of the original pueblo. Strategically located along the roads that have led to La Bajada, this pueblo and its people have played an important role in the history of the Camino Real.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bandelier National Monument — 19 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.
• Valles Caldera National Preserve — 25 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.
• Palace of the Governors — 26 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.
• Jemez Historic Site — 27 mi
  The stone walls of a 1620s mission church standing among the ruins of Gisewa, a Jemez village named for the hot springs beside it.

More markers nearby

• Kewa Women's Co-op — 3.4 mi
• La Bajada — 4.2 mi
• Women of Cochiti — 7.9 mi
• Gold and Turquoise — 11 mi