Drive the Enchanted Circle west from Red River, down through Red River Canyon, and the road delivers you to a village that has guarded the meeting of two rivers for more than 180 years. Questa sits at about 7,500 feet near the confluence of the Red River and the Rio Grande, on the northwestern leg of the Circle. With fewer than 2,000 residents and a single stoplight, it is the quieter side of the loop, but its story is one of the oldest on the whole drive, and its heart is a thick-walled adobe church on the old plaza.
Click to see more photos of Questa and its San Antonio church — the village street in 1939, the church in 1943, and the restored church today
Questa was officially founded in 1842 as San Antonio del Rio Colorado, Saint Anthony on the Red River. The land grant was requested from Mexico in 1841 and granted in January 1842 to 35 families. Settlers built a wall around the plaza for protection and began the San Antonio church that same year, though it took years to finish. In 1855, men harvested ponderosa pine on Flag Mountain for the church roof vigas, skidding logs down with mules and carrying some by hand. When Bishop Lamy visited in 1860, he noted the beautiful new church on the north side of the plaza.
The village kept its long Spanish name until a post office arrived in 1883. The new name was meant to be Cuesta, Spanish for a ridge or slope, but the postmaster misspelled it, and Questa has been Questa ever since. Many of the founding family names, including Rael, Cisneros, Ortiz, Trujillo, Vigil and Gallegos, are still familiar in the village today, and descendants of those early settlers continue to lead the community.
Work changed, but the church stayed at the center. The Questa molybdenum mine, founded in 1916 in the canyon east of town, was the area's primary employer for generations. During the Great Depression, Works Progress Administration crews helped build the Red River Fish Hatchery and a local elementary school. The mine operated, through many owners and shutdowns, until the summer of 2014, when Chevron permanently closed it after it had been declared a Superfund site in 2011.
Then the church itself needed saving. After its west wall collapsed, descendants of the same families who built it refused to let it be torn down. Hundreds of volunteers rebuilt it one adobe brick at a time over six years, gathering for Saturday workdays while a weekday crew kept the work moving. Neighbors partnered with U.S. Forest Service staff to choose and fell trees and hand-carve new timbers, craftspeople made new stained glass, and the restored church was re-consecrated in August 2016. Today it is the focal point of the Questa History Trail and stands, open in daylight hours, as proof that on the Enchanted Circle, a small village can rebuild its own history by hand.