Salinas Pueblo Missions Quarai
— red sandstone the desert kept upright.
Not only on a wall.
Salinas Pueblo Missions Quarai, 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.
“Red sandstone walls still standing in a pasture south of Albuquerque. La Purísima Concepción de Cuarac was raised by Franciscan friars and the Tompiro Pueblo people in the late 1620s, abandoned within fifty years to drought, famine, and raid. The roof is long gone. The walls remain, the colour of dried blood at noon, the colour of embers near dusk.
The place, in three passes.
Quarai is one of three pueblo-and-mission units, with Abó and Gran Quivira, of Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, administered by the National Park Service. The ruin sits about eight miles north of Mountainair in Torrance County, central New Mexico, at roughly 6,500 feet on the eastern flank of the Manzano Mountains. The mission church and convento were built by the Tompiro-speaking Pueblo inhabitants under Franciscan direction, beginning around 1627. By the late 1670s a sequence of drought, famine, and Apache raids had emptied the pueblo.
The walls are local red sandstone, quarried from the slopes above the pueblo and laid in lime mortar. The nave of La Purísima Concepción de Cuarac rises nearly forty feet at its tallest standing point, one of the most intact mission ruins in the American Southwest. The stone reads almost black after rain and the colour of new brick at noon. The convento beside the church preserves the room layout of Franciscan mission practice — refectory, kitchen, friars' cells, a single small chapel.
Quarai sees a fraction of the traffic that reaches Pecos or Bandelier. Combined annual visitation across all three Salinas units runs roughly thirty thousand, and Quarai's share is the smallest of the three. The pueblo grounds hold the ruin in a shallow grass basin ringed by piñon and juniper. Wind moves through the open nave. A small visitor centre stands at the trailhead; the walk to the ruin is short, mostly level, and almost always alone.
