Albuquerque & the Middle Rio Grande

The Tiwa pueblos along this stretch of the Rio Grande were the first Coronado's army wintered among, in 1540, and the first it went to war with when it seized their food and houses. Sandia and Isleta Pueblos are their living descendants. Albuquerque was founded beside the river in 1706 and named for a Spanish duke, and its Old Town plaza still sits at the center of the colonial grid.

Route 66 came through twice. The first alignment ran north and south down Fourth Street; after 1937 the road was straightened to run east and west along Central Avenue, and the motels and neon signs are still there. East of the Manzano Mountains the Salinas Pueblo Missions stand roofless at Abó, Quarai and Gran Quivira, where Tompiro and Tiwa towns traded salt from the nearby lakes for centuries. Drought, famine, disease and Apache raids emptied all three by the late 1670s.

South of Socorro tens of thousands of sandhill cranes winter at Bosque del Apache. Beyond them lies the Jornada del Muerto, the dry shortcut of the Camino Real, and on its northern end, on July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was exploded at the Trinity Site. Out on the Plains of San Agustin west of Socorro, the twenty-seven dishes of the Very Large Array point at the sky.

What to See in Albuquerque & the Middle Rio Grande

5 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge

San Antonio

A Rio Grande refuge south of Socorro where cranes and geese winter by the tens of thousands on wetlands and fields kept by people, because the river no longer floods to make them.

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Historic Sites

Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument

Mountainair

Three Spanish mission churches raised over Tiwa and Tompiro pueblos east of the Manzano Mountains in the 1600s, each of its own stone, and one never finished.

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Trinity Site

San Antonio

Where the first atomic bomb was exploded on July 16, 1945, open one day a year, and remembered by its neighbors as the start of decades of illness the government took eighty years to acknowledge.

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Towns & Gateways

Petroglyph National Monument

Albuquerque

Some 24,000 images pecked into the dark basalt of Albuquerque's West Mesa, protected in 1990 and then crossed by a city boulevard.

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Attractions

Very Large Array

Magdalena

Twenty-seven radio dishes, each 82 feet across and 230 tons, spread in a Y across an Ice Age lakebed on the Plains of San Agustin and moved on rails to change how sharply they see.

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Scenic Drives through Albuquerque & the Middle Rio Grande

Stories from Albuquerque & the Middle Rio Grande

Albuquerque & the Middle Rio Grande rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.