Historic Adobe Houses of Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico

Acoma Pueblo — Haak’u, “the place that always was” — sits atop a 367-foot sandstone mesa fifty miles west of Albuquerque. The Acoma people have lived continuously on the mesa since at least the twelfth century, making it one of the two or three oldest continuously inhabited communities in North America. The pueblo’s three rows of multistory adobe houses face south across the mesa-top, their flat roofs gathering water in the small aljibes — cisterns — cut into the stone below.

The defining building of the pueblo is the San Esteban del Rey Mission, begun in 1629 under the Franciscan friar Juan Ramírez and completed in 1641. To raise its earthen walls — sixty feet tall and ten feet thick at the base — every adobe brick, every ceiling beam, and every gallon of water had to be carried up the mesa on the backs of the Acoma people themselves; the vigas that span the nave were carried twenty miles from Mount Taylor. The church was burned in the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, rebuilt within a decade, and has been replastered by hand every summer since. It is a National Historic Landmark and, along with Taos Pueblo, one of the two Pueblo missions on the UNESCO World Heritage tentative list.

The pueblo itself remains an active community: families maintain houses on the mesa-top that have been continuously occupied for thirty generations, and the tribe controls every visitor’s access to the village. Photography of the mission interior is prohibited; photography of the village requires a tribal permit. The mesa, the mission, and the pueblo form a single architectural and cultural complex without equal in North America.