Santa Rita Copper Mine

Around 1800 an Apache man showed the copper here to José Manuel Carrasco, a retired Spanish officer, and Carrasco staked a claim and began mining it. He sold out to Francisco Manuel de Elguea, who brought in convict labor, built an adobe fort to hold the workers and guard them, and sent the copper south to Mexico by mule train. They called the place Santa Rita del Cobre.

In 1910 the Chino Copper Company began working it as an open pit, with steam shovels and rail cars, and the pit kept spreading. The company town of Santa Rita stood on its edge. In the 1950s ore was found under the town itself, the townsite was abandoned and its people moved away, and by 1970 Santa Rita was gone. Its former residents keep its memory at the Santa Rita Shrine, a lone structure at the junction of NM-152 and NM-356.

The pit is now about 1,500 feet deep and a mile and a half across, owned by Freeport-McMoRan, which paused mining in 2008 and resumed in 2011. An overlook on the south side of NM-152 east of Hanover has displays on the mine's history and works. On the skyline beyond the pit stands the Kneeling Nun, a block of the same volcanic tuff as City of Rocks that slid from the cliffs above it and has long been said to resemble a nun kneeling in prayer. As the mine has moved toward it, people have raised concerns about how stable it is.