Taos Pueblo
Taos, New Mexico
Story
The north house at Taos Pueblo is said to be the most photographed building in North America. That fact does a strange thing: it makes the building feel familiar before you've ever stood in front of it. But the photographs always flatten what the structure actually is — not a ruin, not a museum piece, not a monument to something finished. People have lived here continuously for at least 700 years. As of 2010, roughly 150 people still do, without electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing, by community choice.
The pueblo took its current form in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Spanish conquistadors from the Francisco Vásquez de Coronado expedition reached it in 1540, looking for the Seven Cities of Gold and finding instead a five- and six-story adobe complex whose walls were already old. The original buildings had no standard doorways — entry was through square openings in the roof, reached by wooden ladders. The thick reddish-brown walls, made from earth and straw, are rebuilt and replastered by residents every generation. The building is not preserved; it is maintained.
In February 1847, U.S. forces under Col. Sterling Price bombarded the old San Geronimo mission church on the pueblo grounds with artillery. More than 150 people sheltering inside were killed. The ruins of that church still stand at the edge of the compound — roofless, the bell tower partially intact, a graveyard pressed up against its walls. It is one of the few places in the American Southwest where you can stand inside the direct physical consequence of a named military event and feel its weight in the remaining adobe.
The water running through the center of the compound is Rio Pueblo de Taos, flowing down from Blue Lake high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The Pueblo considers Blue Lake sacred — their creation point, the place where ancestors dwell. The U.S. government seized that land in the early 20th century under Theodore Roosevelt. It took until 1970 and an act of Congress signed by Richard Nixon to return it.
What to Spot
The roofless shell of the original San Geronimo mission church at the edge of the compound, its partially standing bell tower rising above an adjacent graveyard with wooden crosses pressed close to the adobe walls.
Bonus Finds
- The vigas — the thick Engelmann Spruce log ends — protruding from the upper walls of the north and south house blocks, the same structural system used here for centuries, still visible at every floor level.
- The Rio Pueblo de Taos running directly through the center of the compound, a small living stream that has supplied the pueblo's water — and defined its layout — since the settlement was first built.
- The multi-story stepped profile of the north house, where each receding level creates a terrace for the floor above, the same arrangement Hernando de Alvarado described when the Coronado expedition arrived in 1540.
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Photo: John Phelan / CC BY-SA 3.0