Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument

East of the Manzano Mountains the Estancia Basin holds salt lakes that drew traders for centuries, and three large pueblos stood near them: Quarai, Abó, and farther south Las Humanas, now called Gran Quivira. Franciscans came from 1620 and had the people of each town build a mission church. The three sites, miles apart across the grassland, make up the monument, with its main visitor center in the town of Mountainair between them.

Each church is made of its own stone. Quarai, about eight miles north of Mountainair, is red sandstone, its walls still standing about forty feet high; it was built around 1630 under Fray Esteban de Perea. Abó, west of town off US-60, is red sandstone too, its first church begun in 1623 and a larger one raised about 1640. Gran Quivira, about 25 miles south, is built of angular gray limestone. It has two churches: the small San Isidro, and San Buenaventura, begun around 1659 and never finished, its walls rising to about thirty feet over the excavated rooms and kivas of the pueblo.

All of it was raised by Pueblo hands. By the early 1670s drought, famine, disease and Apache raids had emptied all three towns, and their surviving people went to the pueblos of the Rio Grande.

Gran Quivira was proclaimed a national monument in 1909, and Abó and Quarai were added later. Each site has a short trail and a small visitor center, and there is no charge at any of them.