Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Cubero, NM

Cubero is a census-designated place in Cibola County, New Mexico.

The 2020 census counted 281 residents in Cubero, close to the 289 residents recorded in the 2010 census.

Unlike most small communities in its area, Cubero has a post office of its own, with ZIP code 87014.

The village was founded by Mexican settlers on a Spanish-era land grant: in 1833 territorial governor Francisco Sarracino granted some 16,500 acres to seventy families who bought their lots from Francisco Baca.

In the Laguna language the place is called Púñi Tsiama, meaning "West Doorway," for its position at the western entrance to the Laguna stretch of the San Jose River valley.

The name Cubero may honor Pedro Rodríguez Cubero, a Spanish colonial governor of New Mexico, and in Spanish the word cubero means a cooper, a maker of tubs and barrels.

The village stood along the route of the Santa Fe Railroad's first transcontinental line through the Southwest, although in the 1880s the railroad placed the station it named Cubero about six miles to the southeast, at what is now Paraje.

The original 1926 alignment of U.S. Route 66 ran straight through Cubero, but in 1937 the highway was moved south along what is now NM 124, a bypass still remembered as the Cubero cutoff.

On the new alignment stood the Villa de Cubero, a Spanish Revival trading post, cafe, and tourist court built by trader Sidney Gottlieb, who was also a state senator, and promoted as the first motel west of Albuquerque.

A persistent local legend holds that Ernest Hemingway wrote part of The Old Man and the Sea while staying at the Villa de Cubero in the early 1950s and eating at Mary Gunn's cafe there, a story Hemingway scholars regard as myth.