Santa Fe River Joins the Rio Grande

The Santa Fe River starts in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range and passes through the state capital, Santa Fe providing approximately 40% of the city's water supply. It is an intermittent stream with two perennial reaches.

El Camino Real follows it from the Rio Grande to Santa Fe.

The river is 46 miles long. It was first dammed in 1881 and flows when water is released by the city of Santa Fe from two continuous reservoirs. The site of the 1881 dam, upstream of Santa Fe, is now part of the 190-acre Santa Fe Canyon Preserve, a trailhead for the 20-mile Dale Ball Foothill Trail System.

Santa Fe, New Mexico’s capital, sits in the Sangre de Cristo foothills. It’s renowned for its Pueblo-style architecture and as a creative arts hotbed. Founded as a Spanish colony in 1610, it has at its heart the traditional Plaza. The surrounding historic district’s crooked streets wind past adobe landmarks including the Palace of the Governors, now home to the New Mexico History Museum.

The Rio Grande, known in Mexico as the Río Bravo del Norte or simply the Río Bravo, is one of the principal rivers in the southwestern United States and in northern Mexico. The length of the Rio Grande is 1,896 miles. It originates in south-central Colorado, in the United States, and flows to the Gulf of Mexico.

The Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (English: Royal Road of the Interior Land) was a Spanish 1,590 mi long road between Mexico City and San Juan Pueblo, New Mexico, USA, that was used from 1598 to 1882. It was the northernmost of the four major "royal roads" that linked Mexico City to its major tributaries during and after the Spanish colonial era.

The road is identified as beginning at the Plaza Santo Domingo very close to the present Zócalo and Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City.[4] Traveling north through San Miguel de Allende, the road's northern terminus was near Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Long before Europeans arrived, the various indigenous tribes and kingdoms that had arisen throughout the northern central steppe of Mexico had established the route that would later become the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro as a major thoroughfare for hunting and trading. The route connected the peoples of the Valley of Mexico with those of the north through the exchange of products such as turquoise, obsidian, salt and feathers. By the year AD 1000, a flourishing trade network existed from Mesoamerica to the Rocky Mountains.