Spanish Entrada Site
Posted by: 
Aarky
N 35° 18.230 W 106° 35.250
13S E 355669 N 3907893
A camp where Francisco Vasquez de Coronado's troops may have spent the winter of 1540-41.
Waymark Code: WMA9MD
Location: New Mexico, United States
Date Posted: 12/09/2010
Views: 5
Shallow dugouts west of Bernalillo indicate the presence of a campsite nearby, probably used around 1540. Archeologists believe the camp may have been that of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, leader of one of the first Spanish explorations of New Mexico. Coronado had come to New Mexico to search for the Seven Cities of Cibola, mythical cities of gold rumored to exist somewhere in this unexplored interior land or possibly on the Great Plains. While exploring what is now New Mexico, one of Coronado's men, Hernando de Alvarado, encountered the pueblos along the upper Rio Grande near here and suggested to Coronado that the location would make a good place for the expedition to shiver out the approaching winter of 1540-41.
Archeologists believe that the site excavated near Bernalillo probably served as a provisional camp at which Coronado and his three hundred soldiers first settled that winter. It is, according to the National Park Service, the only site in the southwestern United States known to be associated with an entrada, or Spanish exploratory expedition.
The soldiers used the campsite only temporarily. The cold winter air later forced Coronado and his men to abandon the site and appropriate a nearby Indian pueblo. Some historian believe the pueblo they chose, called Alcanfor in a chronicle of the expedition, was the Tiwa-speaking pueblo of Kuaua. Ruins of Kuaua are preserved in what is now the Coronado State Monument. Other historians feel it may have been a different pueblo entirely.
David Pike, Roadside New Mexico, University of New Mexico Press, 2004.