The lonely land of Camino Real

SOCORRO COUNTRY, N.M. — I'm staggering like a man under the influence, struggling to keep my feet, as I bow my head and push into a malicious wind.

The pages in my notebook hum like a rattlesnake's warning as the gale tries to twist it from my hand.

I'm in the amphitheater section just outside the El Camino Real International Heritage Center. But on this raw, turbulent afternoon — alone because no one else is nuts enough to leave the shelter of the center — I feel as if I were suddenly lost in an unforgiving wilderness.

I've come to the center, New Mexico's new state monument, about 35 miles south of Socorro, to learn about El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. That's the Royal Road of the Interior, which stretched about 1,500 miles from Mexico City to the Espanola Valley north of Santa Fe.

In January 1598, 408 years ago, Juan de Onate set out on this road from the village of Santa Barbara in New Spain (Mexico), leading the first group of Europeans to establish a lasting colony in what would become the United States.

The road they followed is 20 miles east of where I'm standing. But staring into the desolate distance over the sage, sumac and snakeweed cowering in the wind, peering into the haze trapped between the Fra Cristobal and San Andres mountains, I'm reminded of the words of one early Spanish traveler — "Oh God! What a lonely land."

Just to the west of the center, cars and trucks streak along I-25, covering in 10 minutes or less what the Spanish caravans covered on a good day 400 years ago.

Look that way to see how much has changed. Look back to the east and the south, into the mouth of the Jornada del Muerto, the arid, 90-mile stretch of Camino Real between here and Las Cruces, to see how much hasn't.

There's nothing moving out there — except the wind, the dust and the sand.

There wasn't just one Camino Real. Royal roads served all the Spanish colonies. There were four of them in the old Spanish/Mexican lands that would be acquired by the United States after the Mexican War.

One was the Mission Trail in California, between what is now San Diego and San Francisco.

Another Royal Road connected Old Mexico to Spanish missions and settlements in Texas.

And a third ran east to west, connecting Spanish settlements in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

The fourth, the one celebrated by the International Heritage Center here, climbs up out of Old Mexico and bores into the heart, history and culture of New Mexico.

Roughly paralleling I-25 for much of its 400-mile run in New Mexico, the road ends north of Espanola, near the Indian village the Spanish renamed San Juan Pueblo. It was there that the colonists led by Onate built the first Spanish settlement in New Mexico.