Last Sunday (April 22), Brendan and I packed a picnic lunch and got out of town. This time we headed to southeast to the far side of the Manzano Mountains. Twenty minutes from home we were in national forest territory and feeling hungry. So we stopped at Pine Flat picnic ground and enjoyed a lunch of chicken fingers and hardboiled eggs. A beautiful one-hour drive later we reached the turn-off for one of the three sections of the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument; Quarai (Cuarac), a pueblo that was abandoned by its inhabitants in 1677.
At one time more than 500 people lived in this settlement. At the end, when drought, starvation and disease had taken a heavy toll, the remaining 200 families left their homes behind in the hope of finding a new home with another Tiwa-speaking community.
The most striking feature of the Monument is the great hulking ruin of the church. Guided by Franciscan friars, the Tiwa-speaking villagers constructed this sturdy structure both as a place of worship and a refuge from raiding Apaches. Today the National Park Service works to protect the remaining walls from the onslaught of windblown sand and rain.
They went first to Abo, where today there is another ruin much like Quarai. Eventually they ended up at Isleta, which is still an inhabited community (complete with casino).
Much of Quarai is unexcavated. The small hill on the left of the photo below is actually a mound of rubble from a multi-story dwelling. The park ranger said, "That's what happens if you don't dust for several hundred years."
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