Abiquiu

The village of Abiquiu is best known as the home of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch. Cerro Pedernal—the subject of many of her paintings, sharp-edged yet graceful—lifts into the sky, catching light that shifts and softens with each passing hour. Multicolored cliffs of ochre, rose, and ivory rise from blush-pink soil where cholla, prickly pear, and juniper take root. In the stillness, the wind threads through tall grass, carrying the quiet breath of the desert.

It was this beauty that first drew me here, my camera searching for the pastel light and open space that O’Keeffe once chased. But the more time I spent walking these hills, the more I felt a weight beneath their beauty—stories held in the land itself. Long before O’Keeffe painted its forms, ancient pueblos thrived here as early as the 14th century. Centuries later, the Genízaro—freed, detribalized slaves—made Abiquiu their home, living at the threshold between Spanish colonization and the Native American frontier. Many of their descendants remain, protected in part by a recent legal victory that secured their ancestral land. And from this place begins the Old Spanish Trail, a demanding route once stretching from Santa Fe to Los Angeles, a path carved by trade, endurance, and the meeting of worlds.