New Mexico Entertainment

Abó Ruins

Mission of San Gregorio de Abó

Located on a pass opening onto the Rio Grande Valley, Abó had carried on a lively trade with people of the Acoma-Zuñi area, the Galisteo Basin near Santa Fe, and the plains.  Salt, hides, and piñon nuts passed through this trading center.  Springs provided water for households, crops, and flocks of turkeys.   Abó was a thriving community when the Spaniards first visited the Salinas Valley in 1581.  Franciscans began converting Abó residents in 1622, and by the late 1620s the first church was finished.  Later, a second church was built with a sophisticated buttressing technique unusual in 17th-century New Mexico.   It had an organ and trained choir.  In the end, however, cultural conflict and natural disaster devastated the Salinas pueblos.  The Apaches, formerly trading partners, now raided the pueblos for food and in retribution for Spanish slave raids in which Pueblo Indians had participated.  The Pueblos might have survived the raids, but they -- and the Apaches and Spaniards -- were hit during the 1660s and '70s with drought and wide-spread famine that killed 450 people at Gran Quivira alone.   Recurring epidemics further decimated the populace, which had little resistance to introduced diseases.  The ability of the pueblos to withstand these disasters may have been weakened by the disruption of their culture under Spanish rule.  In any event, the Salinas pueblos and missions were abandoned during the 1670s, and the surviving Indians went to live with cultural relatives in other pueblos (the people of Abó departed sometimes between 1672 and 1678 to take refuge in towns along the Rio Grande).

-- Information from the National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

March 2000

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