New Mexico center tells story of historic route

SOCORRO, N.M. — The busy interstate highway is just a few miles away, the glint of truck tops visible in the afternoon sun.

But spreading out in front of you is vast, open country where brown expanses of desert scrub give way to the rich rusts and golds of the bosque and the swath of trees along the Rio Grande.

Pause a moment and savor the stillness. You can almost see the dust raised by a centuries-ago caravan of wooden ox carts, footsore travelers and livestock on their way north along the river to the new world.

The convoy, moving at the speed of its slowest animal, would make about 20 miles a day.

"How fast a pig could go is how fast the main party could go," said Tim McElroy, director of New Mexico's newest state monument, El Camino Real International Heritage Center.

The center tells the story of the 1,500-mile-long "royal road" that stretched from Mexico City to just north of Santa Fe.

Along this trade route, indigenous peoples transported feathers and shells to the north and turquoise to the south; explorers led expeditions to claim land and riches for the king of Spain; missionaries and settlers brought a culture that forever changed the north.

"The truth is, it was the major highway into and out of the new world, starting in 1598 and until it got put out of business by the railroad in the late 1880s," says local historian Paul Harden.

With dirt paths and then highways tracking portions of the historic trail — I-25 parallels its western branch — it is one of the oldest continuously used roads in North America.

The new museum in south-central New Mexico is located near a popular national wildlife refuge that straddles the Rio Grande.

The Bosque del Apache is the winter home to thousands of sandhill cranes, Canada geese, snow geese and ducks. The 57,000-acre refuge's farm fields and marshes resound with their chatter, and bird-watchers delight in the sight of wave after wave of them landing in the marshes at dusk.

Visitors can easily see the new heritage center and the Bosque del Apache in a day trip of about 110 miles south from Albuquerque or about 120 miles north from Las Cruces.

El Camino Real International Heritage Center is at the northern edge of the Jornada del Muerto, or Deadman's Journey — a waterless, 90-mile shortcut on the trail that provided smooth but perilous going for wagons.