Cerrillos Hills State Park

A Very Special Place

The Cerrillos Hills, a group of a half dozen or so conical hills rising nearly a thousand feet above the plains 25 miles [40 km.] south of Santa Fe, are time-honored landmarks for travelers between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Driving Interstate Highway 25 you see them to the east as you traverse the La Bajada escarpment, the great divide of the Rio Grande; the passage from Rio Abajo to Rio Ariba, from the Low River to the High River. La Bajada and the Cerrillos Hills are the products of a complex geologic process,and it was this process that endowed the hills with their distinctive and attractive mix of minerals. And when the land was made it was filled with the plants and animals of the High Desert-Uplands transition zone: The Pygmy Forest.

For the many people who have lived here in the past and who live here today, these hills are special. They are scenic, they are sacred, they are a natural playground and the playground of greed, and they are our back yard. The footprints of history on these hills, sometimes worn and faint, go back a thousand years and many more.

A CULTURAL-HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

Over the last thousand years the Cerrillos Hills, with its tricultural heritage, have held an unusually important place in the history of the American Southwest. The Cerrillos Hills turquoise and lead deposits played a central role in the commerce and economy of the prehistoric Indians of the greater Rio Grande Valley, and it is probable that these mineral deposits influenced the early Spanish explorations and settlement of New Mexico.

The layers of lifeways in these hills, from pre-Columbian shrines, excavations and stone tools to Spanish-American and Anglo-American recreation, ranching, and commerce, give us our identity, define our cultural character, and constitute our heritage. To see and touch the mines that were dug by prospectors a hundred years ago, the stumps of the trees they cut for firewood and shoring, and the sites of their tents and the walls of their shelters is far more meaningful and memorable than simply reading about it in a book. The Cerrillos Hills Historic Park brings us into real contact with our real history.

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