Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument

Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument includes three sites remnant of Spanish and Pueblo Peoples encounters, reminders of the earliest contact.

Once, thriving trade communities of Tiwa and Tompiro-speaking Puebloans inhabited this remote frontier area of central New Mexico. Early in the 17th-century Spanish Franciscans found the area ripe for their missionary efforts. However, by the late 1670s the entire Salinas District, as the Spanish had named it, was depopulated of both Puebloans and Spaniards.

What remains today are the ruins of four mission churches at Quarai, and the partially excavated pueblo of Las Humanas or, as it is known today, Gran Quivira.