Chapel of Santa Cruz

The Chapel of Santa Cruz stands on the south side of the small plaza at Ojo Caliente, the village in northern New Mexico that grew up around a cluster of geothermal springs long used by Tewa-speaking residents of the Chama valley. The exact date of the chapel's construction is not preserved in the registry data, but the building belongs to the regional tradition of small mission visita chapels raised by Hispano farming communities during the late Spanish colonial and Mexican periods.

The structure is a vernacular adobe of the northern New Mexico mission type. Its load-bearing walls are sun-dried mud brick laid on shallow stone footings, several feet thick at the base and finished in mud plaster. The plan is a single rectangular nave with a simple sanctuary and a low choir loft, roofed with peeled vigas and split-cedar latillas under earth and, in later years, sheet metal. A small espadaña or bell wall rises from the front gable, and the entry is framed by a low timber-lintel doorway. Drawings and photographs of the building, together with the larger Santa Cruz mission system, were recorded by the Historic American Buildings Survey under HABS NM-25-SANCRU-1.

The chapel served the agricultural community gathered along the Ojo Caliente River and was tied liturgically to the larger mission church at Santa Cruz de la Cañada near Española. Its modest scale and accretive construction make it representative of the family- and village-built religious architecture that is the defining contribution of New Mexico to the adobe tradition.

The Chapel of Santa Cruz was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 under reference 75001174 for its architectural and cultural significance. The building is privately held and not regularly open to visitors, though it remains a visible part of the Ojo Caliente plaza and of the broader chain of northern New Mexico adobe chapels that links Chimayó, Truchas, Las Trampas, and the Chama valley villages.