CARTA: Keeping Goodwill Alive on El Camino Real

El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the “Royal Road of the Interior,” was laid over far older footpaths that linked the ancient cultures of Mexico with the peoples of the Rio Grande. It became a National Historic Trail in 2000, and today federal agencies tend it alongside tribal nations, towns, landowners and heritage groups.

Among the most devoted of those groups is CARTA, the El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro Trail Association, founded to foster goodwill, cooperation and understanding among the communities along the trail and to protect its multicultural history. Its volunteers publish the journal Chronicles of the Trail, take part in tribal listening sessions, and have helped shape interpretive signs in El Paso County and plans for an interpretive center at the foot of Mount Cristo Rey in Sunland Park. A road that once carried conquest is slowly becoming a road of shared memory.

Sources: El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro Trail Association (GroundworksNM) · CARTA trail report (Partnership for the National Trails System) · El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail (BLM)