Despite this neglect, El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro was probably the most significant of all the early trails on the North American continent. It was the first road in America, and for nearly a century the longest.

The first permanent European settlers in what would become the western United States came northward along this trail. The first breeding horses, cattle and sheep entered the American West via this trail. The wheel, gunpowder, written language, iron and Christianity first became established in America through this road. In 1680, when the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico revolted, attacked Santa Fe, and drove the Spanish out of New Mexico, it was the Camino Real that became the lifeline for the retreating Spaniards. And in 1692 the Camino Real carried don Diego de Vargas back into New Mexico to reconquer the province for Spain.

Even the later history of America was profoundly affected by the trail. The U.S. army that invaded Mexico during the Mexican-American war drove all the way to the capital of Chihuahua on the Camino Real and took the city. In the treaty that ended the war, Mexico lost nearly half its territory, and the United States gained California and the Southwest along with parts of Nevada, Utah and Colorado. During the Civil War, the Confederacy lost its dream of capturing the West because of this trail. For better or worse, the Camino Real changed the history of the United States and Mexico as no other trail has, before or since.

Legend has it that this ruin in Zacatecas, called Chicomoztoc or La Quemada, was the very place from which the Aztecs set out on their journey to the Valley of Mexico to found the city of Tenochtitlán - today's Mexico City. Then, the two sites were connected by an old trail, much like the the Indian footpaths that were the beginning of the Camino Real.

The trail was first "blazed' in its entirety in 1598 by Juan de Oñate and his settlers, who were looking for a direct route to the tierra nueva in the far north. (The word "blaze' in this context is appropriate: Oñate had to find, somewhere in that maze of faint Indian footpaths, one that could accommodate hundreds of people, horses and heavy-wheeled carts.) Their first settlement in New Mexico was on the Rio Grande north of present-day Española, New Mexico. A decade later they moved to a more congenial spot: a cozy river valley rustling with cottonwoods, nestled at the base of some high mountains. They named the new town Holy Faith, or Santa Fe. The trail that Oñate blazed became the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, and for the next 200 years it would be the only link between New Mexico and the outside world.

In the old town of Santa Brigida, an Indian woman gleans kernels of corn from old husks. This area once produced tons of smelted ore from mines along the Camino Real. "As you can see," she said, "we are very poor. Since the mines closed, we have nothing. But God provides."

In the years following the Civil War, the trail slowly lost its importance. The Navajos and Apaches were defeated and removed to distant reservations, and the forts along the trail were abandoned. By the 1880s and 1890s, rails had been built along most segments of the trail, and by the end of the 19th century the Camino Real was only a memory.

The word trail or road is a misnomer for the Camino Real: it more closely resembles a braid. There were shortcuts and longcuts, rough trails for packtrains and smoother roads for carretas, drier routes and wetter routes, harsher routes and gentler routes. Those in a hurry with light wagons often took different routes from those with more time or heavier cargo. During droughts, sections of the trail in Chihuahua were temporarily abandoned. The southern part of the trail, in the states of Durango, Zacatecas and Guanajuato, branched and forked among various towns for reasons of trade, mining and local commerce.

But the most important fact of the trail is not where it went: it is the fact of movement. "Our nature lies in movement,' Pascal wrote; "complete calm is death.' The Camino Real, first and foremost, is a symbol of the eternal human desire to move, to wander, to see what lies over what the Spanish called las sierras azules, 'the blue mountains.' This wanderlust is a profound part of our nature, and the Camino Real is a living symbol of our deep human need.

The old Camino Real traverses some of the loveliest, and some of the ugliest, landscapes in northern Mexico and the American Southwest. The contrasts are striking. Sometimes we found it as a dirt road winding beside cool groves of cottonwoods, with great blue herons flying overhead. Sometimes it was a lonely railroad track vanishing at the horizon. Sometimes we found huge dunefields or vast dry lakebeds whipped up by alkali-laden dust devils. Sometimes we found a cheerful country road passing through Hispanic or Mexican villages, alongside fields of ripening chiles. And sometimes we found ourselves creeping through a tangle of angry commuters on a downtown avenue lined with strip malls or winging our way down a highway crowded with billboards, gaming casinos and trash.

There were rare moments when we found the actual Camino Real. These were the places farthest from civilization, distant from the scape-changing chaos of the modern world, in desert areas largely abandoned by humanity. At these times the trail sometimes appeared as a faint swale across the desert or a subtle change of vegetation; at other times it was a series of parallel ruts worn into the very bedrock.

In the early days of the Camino Real, even Mexico City was a backwater, months by ship from the seat of government in Spain. The men who journeyed to the moon were, for all practical purposes, far closer to civilization than those who journeyed up the Camino Real. Don Diego de Vargas, the reconquerer of New Mexico, called the land "remote beyond compare. "There is nothing today by which we can gauge its remoteness.

The southern segment of the Camino Real passes through some of the oldest towns in the New World: Querétaro, Guanajuato, San Miguel de Allende, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, Nombre de Dios, Sombrerete. Many of the families who would later settle New Mexico came from these places. Often the towns derived their wealth from the extraction of silver from the ground. The richness of this part of Mexico in the 17th and 18th centuries was astounding, but those shining centuries of fantastic wealth were followed by several centuries of decline into genteel poverty. As a result the magnificent colonial centers of these towns are islands of splendor in a sea of gritty industry and suburban sprawl.

When Don Juan Oñate was appointed mayor of this city, San Luis Potosí, one of his responsibilities was to draw a plan of the proposed city, outlining blocks, streets, plazas, churches and government buildings. Oñate's abilities so impressed the Viceroy that they were a major factor in his later winning the right to settle New Mexico.

The Parroquia in San Miguel de Allende is one such example: it was designed by an Indian who copied a picture of an Italian cathedral tower out of a book and scratched the plans into the dirt. Whether he realized there was more to a cathedral than a tower is unclear, but the end result is a church that rises abruptly, steeplelike, from the ground itself, as if the earth were cathedral enough.

The adobe churches of New Mexico are the spiritual cousins of these Mexican churches, particularly those in the poorer towns. In New Mexico the churches were constructed by untutored people, using whatever materials were at hand, which limited their choices to mud, tree trunks, rough stone and sticks. The Pueblo Indians built churches in the same manner as they built their mud pueblos, the men laying the adobes and the woman plastering and doing the finishing work. The architectural plans were also sometimes scraped into the dirt with a stick or bootheel. The limitation of materials and the fragility of adobe did not allow for ornamentation, and there was no money for gold leaf or elaborate decoration. As a result the interiors of the New Mexican churches have a spiritual asceticism that is far more moving, in my opinion, than the most elaborate baroque Mexican altar. Paradoxically the primitive method of building a church resulted in some of the most beautiful and enduring religious architecture the world has ever seen.

In Mexico churches were commonly sited in locations visible from miles around. Travelers on the southern Camino Real through this rolling country were sometimes able to see their evening's destination by noontime. As we traveled the route, we were rarely out of sight of a church, usually a whitewashed bell tower rising from a green river valley or peeking between hills.

One of the most remarkable churches we visited on the trail is that of Atotonilco, which lies a few miles outside San Miguel de Allende, down a bumpy cobbled road. Atotonilco was once a major stop on the trail, but now it is a sleepy village lying between planted fields alongside the Río Laja. To walk into this church is to be struck speechless with the power of faith. We arrived in the late afternoon, when the orange light of the sun, passing through tree branches, splashed a pattern of light and shadow on the church's ancient stone facade. The doors opened into a cool interior, with a single bar of light across the floor. A wooden cross, polished by many hands, leaned against one wall, next to a baptismal font carved with the date of its manufacture: 1551. As our eyes adjusted to the dim light, frescoes emerged from the walls and ceilings, covering every square inch of the church interior. These frescoes are the work of an Indian artist, Miguel Antonio Martínez de Pocosangre, who created a Sistine Chapel in the middle of nowhere.

Through this settled country the braids of the Camino Real spread out like a broad delta among farms, mines, towns and commercial centers. The government extended and improved the trail primarily to keep silver flowing from the mines and smelters to the mints and ports. During the early life of the Royal Road, a good percentage of the world's silver was trundled along the trail, and for this reason parts of it are still called the Silver Road.

Contrary to the historical stereotype, I believe the people who came up the Camino Real were not solely or even primarily motivated by the promise of wealth; this is to misunderstand human nature. They came because of hope, because of a dream that ran far deeper than a mere desire for status and comfort. In their spirit they felt the tug of Las Sierras Azules, the distant blue mountains, beyond which lie unknown lands and the promise of a new life.

The Royal Road: El Camino Real from Mexico City to Santa Fe

About the authors and photographer:

Douglas Preston is the author of Cities of Gold, Talking to the Ground, and five novels, and a research associate at the Museum of New Mexico's Laboratory of Anthropology. He writes about archaeology for the The New Yorker, Smithsonian, Natural History and other magazines.

José Antonio Esquibel of Santa Fe researched for 14 years before writing his extensive account of the lives of those who traveled up the Camino Real in successive waves of colonization, from Oñate's first settlers to the 19th century.

Christine Preston's photography has appeared in Smithsonian, The New Yorker and New Mexico Magazine. Her photography will be on exhibit in the meeting room of the Palace of the Governors, April through September 1998. Her work also will show with photography by Jim Bones and Todd Jagger, January 16-February 13, 1998, in the Governor's Gallery at the State Capitol in Santa Fe.