Jemez Historic Site

The Jemez River runs south through San Diego Canyon between red and buff cliffs, and the hot springs along it gave this village its name. Around 1350 the ancestors of the people of Jemez Pueblo, who call themselves Hemish, built Gisewa, a name that refers to the hot water. It rose several stories and may have held as many as a thousand rooms; only part of it lies inside the seven-acre site.

Spanish soldiers reached Gisewa in 1541 and Franciscans in 1598. Between 1621 and 1625 Fray Gerónimo de Zárate Salmerón had its people build San José de los Jémez, a church with stone walls up to eight feet thick and an octagonal bell tower, rare in New Mexico. The friars banned Native ceremonies and destroyed the places where they were held, and the building was raised with Pueblo labor. The mission was given up by about 1640, and the friars concentrated on Walatowa to the south, where Jemez Pueblo stands today. Gisewa's people stayed until the revolt of August 1680 and then moved up onto the mesas above the canyon.

A 1,400-foot trail loops from the visitor center through the pueblo's low walls, down into a reconstructed kiva, and into the roofless nave, whose walls rise straight toward the canyon rim. The exhibits in the visitor center tell the story in the words of Jemez people, and photography is not allowed inside it or in the kiva. The site is a National Historic Landmark and a state historic site, at the north end of the village of Jemez Springs.