San Gabriel On the Camino Real

The capital the panel names was a Tewa village the colonists moved into. At Yunque Owingeh, across the Rio Grande from Ohkay Owingeh, Oñate's settlers turned Pueblo roomblocks into their own quarters, and after 1610 the place fell to ruin and its exact site became legend. In 1959 the pueblo itself asked the archaeologist Florence Hawley Ellis to dig, after an elder digging adobe clay turned up a corroded Spanish helmet. University of New Mexico field schools found a kitchen, a church and domed ovens. The site lies on Ohkay Owingeh land.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker San Gabriel On the Camino Real Governor Juan de Oñate set up his headquarters in San Juan Pueblo in 1598, but by 1601 he had moved the Spanish capital across the Rio Grande to Yuque- Yunque Pueblo. Named San Gabriel, it served as the seat of government until 1610, when Oñate's successor founded a new capital at Santa Fe.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• El Santuario de Chimayó — 8.3 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 — 18 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 — 22 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 — 27 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

• Esther Martinez, P'oe Tsą́wą́ˀ (1912-2006) — steps away
• Dominguez Escalante Trail — 2.4 mi
• Española Valley — 2.9 mi
• Santa Cruz de la Cañada / Santa Cruz Plaza on the Camino Real — 4.2 mi