San Gregorio, Abó, Plan

1623-1672

Ivey, James E. (mapmaker)

Abó, NM, USA

This is a plan of the monastery of San Gregorio at Abó, New Mexico. The complex was built of local materials, stone and adobe, its thick walls punctuated by high windows.

This plan of the monastic complex was drawn after excavations carried out by archaeologists in the 1980s. The church was a simple, single nave structure. The prominent circle represents the subterranean kiva structure, which was built into the center of the cloister’s courtyard. In the photograph of San Gregorio that can be found in Vistas, the viewer sees the complex from a point in the upper right of the plan, from a corner of the cloister courtyard, looking to the northwest, toward the ruins of the apse.

This Pueblo town was abandoned in the 1670s, the result of drought, famine, and Apache raids. Today, the excavated ruins of the kiva are part of the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, located near Mountainair, New Mexico and maintained by the United States National Park Service.

Reproduced courtesy of James Ivey

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Edgerton, Samuel. 2001. Theaters of Conversion: Religious Architecture and Indian Artisans in Colonial Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Ivey, James. 1988. In the Midst of Loneliness: The Architectural History of the Salinas Missions. Santa Fe: New Mexico: Southwest Cultural Resources Center.

Treib, Marc, 1993. Sanctuaries of Spanish New Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press.