Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Truchas, NM

Truchas is a census-designated place in Rio Arriba County, an old Spanish land-grant village on the scenic High Road to Taos, about halfway between Santa Fe and Taos.

'Truchas' is Spanish for 'trout,' a name taken from the Rio de las Truchas, the stream that supplies the village's irrigation water.

The settlement began on March 18, 1754, when Governor Tomas Velez Cachupin awarded the Nuestra Senora del Rosario, San Fernando y Santiago del Rio de las Truchas Grant to eleven residents of Chimayo and Pueblo Quemado, present-day Cordova.

The grant, later measured at 14,786.58 acres and patented in 1905, was planted as a defensive outpost to shield Santa Cruz de la Canada from Comanche raids.

The founders built their homes joined together around a single plaza with one entrance, driving their livestock inside the plaza in times of attack, as the grant's conditions required.

Settlers dug an acequia several miles long by hand to carry water down from the flanks of Truchas Peak, and farmed wheat and livestock because maize would not ripen in the cool climate at about 8,000 feet.

In 1776 the visiting friar Francisco Atanasio Dominguez counted 26 families and 122 people at Truchas, double the founding population.

The village church, Nuestra Senora del Rosario, completed about 1805, holds two large altar screens by the celebrated santero Pedro Antonio Fresquis, known as the 'Truchas Master,' one of them dated 1821.

The 2010 census counted 560 people in the Truchas CDP.

A horizontal water wheel powered a grist mill in Truchas from 1873 to 1940, and a paved road did not reach the isolated village until the early 1970s.