Salinas Pueblo Missions & Mountainair — Ruins on the Saline Plains

Southeast of Albuquerque, past the Manzano Mountains and onto the high saline plains, lie three of the most haunting ruins in the Southwest: the seventeenth-century Spanish mission churches of Quarai, Abó, and Gran Quivira, raised over the pueblos of the Tcompiro and Tiwa peoples before drought, famine, and Apache raids emptied the whole district by 1680. Preserved together as Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, their roofless sandstone and limestone walls stand stark against the grassland, among the oldest European structures in the country. At the center of the three sits Mountainair, a tiny Route 66-era railroad and pinto-bean town whose 1923 Pueblo-Deco Shaffer Hotel is a folk-art landmark in its own right. This day loops all three ruins with a long, meditative lunch break in Mountainair between them.