Travel the High Road

A COUPLE MILES UP FROM EL SANTUARIO, I pull into Oviedo Carvings and Bronze, where an orange cat named Pablo (like Picasso) greets me alongside a few curious donkeys. Patricia Trujillo-Oviedo, whose family has called this hilltop property home for seven generations and counting, is watering a cluster of red and orange daisies as I arrive. 

She walks me past meticulously carved bultos, dancing kokopellis, and stone-and-metal alien spaceships, all created by her late husband, Marco. In the gallery’s front room, we pause as Trujillo-Oviedo carefully places a tiny, smiling bronze hedgehog onto a glass shelf. “If you want to get the most out of traveling the High Road,” she says, “you need to approach it with an open heart—and an open mind.”

A Trujillo by birth, she comes from a long line of weavers. Her brother Irvin runs Centinela Traditional Arts just across the road with his wife, Lisa, and daughter, Emily. More family members live in the surrounding hills, where Trujillo-Oviedo has bred and raised hundreds of donkeys as proprietor of Centinela Mammoth Donkey Reserve. “When my ancestors first arrived here in 1710,” she says, “they recognized themselves in the land.”

While the Trujillo-Oviedo family has called this land home for generations, the story of the High Road to Taos stretches even further back. For centuries before the Spanish arrived, it served as a vital network of footpaths, linking Puebloan communities and, at times, connecting them to outside tribes. The Spanish later adapted it into a trade-and-barter route.

“The placitas, the little communities along the High Road, were self-sustaining for centuries,” Trujillo-Oviedo tells me. “We grew our own food, raised sheep for wool, and traded back and forth with neighbors. During the Great Depression, people barely noticed it was happening.” What held them together wasn’t just trade. “Their faith was immense,” she says. “That connection to a higher power was the most important thing to them.”

Her words echo in my mind as I climb into the steepening Sangre de Cristo foothills and arrive in the wood-carving village of Córdova, where hand-lettered signs lead me to the studio of santero Jerry Sandoval. Inside the front room of his small gallery, painted retablos and hand-carved bultos are neatly arranged for sale—favorite subjects include St. Francis of Assisi, Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, and La Virgen de Guadalupe.

Just like generations of artists before him, Sandoval depicts holy personages with a touch that feels personal, but also deeply reverent. “All of my paints are made from natural pigments,” Sandoval says. He points out glass jars of pine sap, used for varnish, and vials of ash, flower petals, and walnut husks—ingredients he often gathers from the hills around his studio.

Sandoval holds up a vial of pale-yellow powder. “This is chamisa,” he says. “It grows everywhere.” Lifting a tenderly painted retablo of La Virgen de Guadalupe, he points to the halo. “You can see how it lights her up. That’s why I use it for halos.” 

His work is both aesthetically and devotionally informed, so Sandoval understands the High Road’s connection between art, tradition, and faith better than most. He grew up worshiping in Córdova’s tiny San Antonio de Padua Church and was one of the santeros who helped restore its bultos, retablos, and altar screen as part of a conservation project led by nonprofit Nuevo Mexico Profundo. 

“Churches matter historically,” says Frank Graziano, the historian and writer who runs Nuevo Mexico Profundo. “But they also offer a tangible link to a people’s lineage. If they aren’t maintained, they’re at real risk of disappearing.” 

Profundo’s popular church tours enlist mayordomos, or village caretakers, and even members of the secretive Hermanos Penitentes, or Penitente Brotherhood, to share first-person stories and context. 

Angelo Sandoval, San Antonio’s former mayordomo and a penitente, says the people who visit this “humble little village are taking a time machine to days past, back to the land of poco tiempo.” 

Inside, the church’s three-part altar screen glows with boldly painted, expressive saints, recently restored by Angelo, his uncle Jerry, and master santeros Victor Goler and Félix López. The team painstakingly removed layers of candle smoke and dust, even excising damaged sections to reveal the original paint beneath. 

The effort, Angelo says, was equal parts faith and love. “The church connects us to God on a personal level,” he says. “It lives in our hearts. We can take it with us anywhere we go.”

FROM CÓRDOVA, THE ROAD WINDS THROUGH Carson National Forest, where skyscraping ponderosas and regal old-growth spruce firs rise around me like the walls of a green cathedral. The forest recedes as I drive into the 18th-century village of Truchas, perched on a cliffside overlooking the Río Grande Valley far below. The air feels thinner here, the sky closer.

Landscape painter Sally Delap-John, one of many artists drawn to the High Road’s austere beauty, visited Truchas in 2007 and immediately fell in love. “I knew I wanted to live here from the moment I first saw it,” says the California native. “It reminded me of traveling through Italy in college.” 

In plein air oil paintings of quiet intensity, Delap-John emphasizes the area’s rugged beauty: vast, luminous skies, shifting light, and layered hills, sometimes interspersed with adobe churches. 

Her home, she says, was built about a hundred years ago, but most of her neighbors have roots that go back much further. Nearby, Truchas’s early 19th-century mission, Nuestra Señora del Rosario, rises amid long-shuttered businesses. The church remains active, despite dwindling numbers of parishioners and priests, which have made even monthly Sunday services difficult to sustain. 

“Outsiders sometimes come to Truchas without realizing how important it is to preserve its history,” Delap-John says. “When you move into a place like this, you don’t want to change it or shake things up too much.”

That fragility is evident just down the road in Las Trampas. The tiny village of less than 50 residents is hilly, green, and tranquil. But in the mid-1700s, when a group of farming families moved here from Santa Fe, the mountainous geography and frequent Comanche raids made establishing the town a precarious undertaking. 

Still, the roughly 275 inhabitants found the strength and faith to build a church as grandly scaled and adorned as San José de Gracia. Out front of its 34-foot-high adobe walls, mayordomo Emilio Martinez pauses from yard work to show me the results of a multiyear renovation completed last June.

Inside the 18th-century structure—Martinez thinks of San José as a cathedral, not a church—we sit in pews next to a large wood panel painted with saints and angels. “I’m always amazed by the devotion of the people who built this place,” he says, tilting his head back to study ornately carved gables that cover San José’s high ceiling. “They had to work so hard just to survive, but they still made building San José their top priority.” 

I look toward the floor, whose broad wood planks feel pleasingly worn, even soft, underfoot. Martinez follows my gaze. “A lot of the people who built this place are buried beneath us,” he says, “right under these planks. They’d be proud to see it still standing.” 

That same spirit of devotion lives on in Andrew and Lorrie Garcia, former teachers from Peñasco and high school sweethearts. After retiring in the early 2000s, they took an art class together that sparked a new path: Andrew became a furniture maker and Lorrie a santera. 

The Garcias’ comfortable gallery building, tucked down the driveway past wildflowers and potted red geraniums, acts as a multimedia showroom. Today, Andrew is carving rosettes into pine panels destined to become cabinet doors, and Lorrie is painting with her seven-year-old grandson, Isaac, who’s visiting from Albuquerque. Lorrie walks me past meticulously painted portraits of Our Lady of Solitude, Saint Barbara, and her personal favorite, La Virgen de Guadalupe. 

Isaac stands nearby, listening to his grandmother describe her inspiration and process. He breaks into a shy smile as Lorrie points out a small but striking retablo he painted of San Pasqual. “Isaac is going to come with us this year to Spanish Market,” Andrew says, leading me past chests, dressers, and cabinets carved in an ornately maximalist style. 

“When I’m carving, it feels soothing, almost meditative,” he says, running his hand over a lattice-worked bureau ledge. “It can feel like prayer.” 

The couple suggest I visit Picurís Pueblo, just across the road, where the historic San Lorenzo de Picurís Mission Church overlooks a small lake ringed with picnic tables and dotted with splashing fountains. Nearby, a newly built “all-wheels” outdoor recreational court folds modern skateboard and mountain-bike ramps into the natural slope of the land. 

A recent DNA study confirmed what oral histories have long held true: Picurís Pueblo members are directly descended from those who lived in and around Chaco Canyon for millennia. That continuity feels visible here—on the bike ramps, in the quiet pace of passersby, and in the land itself. I could stay longer, but my two-and-a-half-hour drive has already become a full day, so I head back to the High Road.

My journey ends in Ranchos de Taos at the 1772-era San Francisco de Asís Church. The mission’s thick adobe walls and soaring twin bell towers make the internationally famous building seem to rise like a fortress against the sky, but up close, its curved forms and weathered surface feel less imposing, more human. Here, at the end of the road, I decide the High Road’s quiet magic lies in how the sacred and the ordinary coexist, waiting to be experienced by anyone willing to slow down.