Salinas Pueblo Missions Abo
— red sandstone walls the wind still moves through.
Not only on a wall.
Salinas Pueblo Missions Abo, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Abó is the western ruin of the three Salinas pueblos, a Tompiro village and Franciscan mission built of red sandstone in the 1620s and abandoned by the 1670s when drought, raids, and disease emptied the basin. The mission church of San Gregorio still stands two stories tall, its walls cut from the same red rock as the bluff behind it. The Estancia plain runs out flat in every direction. Few cars come down the spur road. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Abó is one of three units of Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, set on the western edge of the Estancia Basin in Torrance County, New Mexico, about nine miles west of Mountainair on US 60. The site preserves the ruins of a Tompiro-speaking pueblo and the Spanish Franciscan mission of San Gregorio de Abó. Construction of the first mission began around 1622 under Fray Francisco Fonte, with a larger church completed by the 1650s. The pueblo and mission were abandoned by the 1670s, after a sequence of drought, Apache raids, and epidemic disease emptied the Salinas region a decade before the 1680 Pueblo Revolt.
The Abó walls are cut from the local red sandstone of the Abo Formation, a Permian unit that outcrops along the bluff immediately behind the ruin. The masons laid thin tabular slabs in mud mortar, producing walls roughly five feet thick at the base and rising in places more than thirty feet. The colour shifts through the day, from a deep brick at morning into a near-pink in the late afternoon. The convento walls retain visible plaster patches where Spanish religious paintings once covered the interior surfaces. Few other Spanish colonial ruins in the Southwest carry this red stone signature.
The site is open to the public free of charge, with a small visitor centre near the ruins and a self-guided trail through the mission, convento, and partially excavated pueblo mounds. Hours run roughly 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, with closures on major federal holidays. The headquarters and main visitor centre for the monument is in Mountainair, about nine miles east on US 60, where exhibits cover all three units (Abó, Quarai, and Gran Quivira). Albuquerque sits 75 miles to the northwest along I-25 and US 60.
