8,000+ ac Ranch w/ riverfront, water rights and fertile ground for growing crop
Puerto de Luna, Guadalupe County, New Mexico
This sprawling 8,000+-acre working ranch, located in a historic, largely forgotten fertile New Mexico river valley where Native American settlers, Spanish explorers, and Billy the Kid trod overlapping paths, is a rare, water-rich relic of the wild American West. This enormous ranch is blessed with multiple sources of water, including an approximately four-mile-long stretch of the Pecos River with 122.8-acre-feet of water rights, its own flowing creek that waters 150 cows, and an enormous 400-acre veritable underground lake that provides subterranean irrigation to the trees, plants, grasses and bushes that grow above it. Along with multiple wells and springs, this property is unusually abundant in aqua.
Currently operating as a horse and beef cattle ranch, Pecos Valley Ranch is ripe for its next incarnation as a private corporate/family retreat, greenhouse-based agricultural business, both, or something left to your imagination. Large fields, scenic rocky mesas, and the incredible gift of plentiful water from multiple sources create an oasis-like setting that is almost impossible to find in our drought-ridden times in any other part of the American southwest.
The built environment on this large tract includes:
historic stone relics from ages past;
a large 5,000-sf double-sided owner’s home, each with four bedrooms and two bathrooms in an architect-designed high-ceilinged duplex composed of 2,500 square feet of living space on either side and constructed of solid double-thick adobe walls and massively beamed ceilings;
a sprawling double-thick adobe-walled 5,400-sf guest hacienda with soaring beamed ceiling and 16 beds across six bedrooms, with a full bathroom attached to each bedroom. The hacienda also has a large common space with kitchen, dining room, half bathroom, storage space, enormous living room and outdoor dining table with stupendous views of the river valley. Altogether, this building sleeps up to 20 people in its current bedroom configuration;
a 3,000-sf foreman’s home with three bedrooms and two bathrooms;
five outbuildings, including two hay and equipment barns, one 3,000 sf, the other 1,500 sf; a 3,000-sf main shop; a 1,900-sf tack house; and a 450-sf cabin;
8,165 acres of fenced land divided into 12 pastures to enable rotational grazing.
The owner has studied, honored, and invested in historic and traditional Spanish-Mexican hacienda building styles and has endeavored, with the help of a Santa fe-based architect, to design the buildings that populate this property in a manner that is authentic to its geography and the cultures that have dwelled in the region.
Cottonwoods, tall sacaton grasses with roots deep into the ground, pinon, deer, wild turkeys, bobcats, foxes, coyotes, mountain lions, golden eagles, hawks/raptors, cranes, geese, trout, catfish, carp, red jasper, pottery shards, Clovis culture arrowhead points, and ancient petrified wood all call this exquisite, untouched river valley property their home, along with fewer than 200 neighboring human residents of the sleepy town of Puerto de Luna, named, as legend has it, by the Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado while he took in the beauty of the moonrise over these ancient hills.
The area was cultivated in the middle of the 19th century by Spaniards, Mexicans, and Apache communities but was later eclipsed by the city of Santa Rosa to the north, when a railway line was installed there, bypassing Puerto de Luna. This left this lush river valley to Santa Rosa’s south largely forgotten as commerce rushed northward – and preserved it.
The family that currently owns the property has been operating two businesses on it for some time: a 1,000-head Simmental x Angus x Akaushi beef cattle operation as well as a guest facility for travelers looking to experience the true American southwest on horseback, complete with branding, herding, and trail-riding opportunities. The latter business has been very successful in attracting primarily European visitors looking for an authentic Western experience in a purely natural environment.
Over the years the owners have grown hemp, alfalfa, and other feed grasses/hays on their 400-500 acres of open fields and have also leased out part of their land holdings to other farmers and ranchers. On their horseback-riding adventures, wranglers at the ranch are able to take guests out every day of the week on a different three- to five-hour trail ride without needing to stray from the ranch’s own boundaries, including along old rocky stagecoach trails and a pathway named for Billy the Kid, who is known to have spent time in the area.
Exquisite western and Native American-themed and -created artwork and artifacts decorate the houses, including 100-year-old Dine blankets, original large-scale paintings, and collections of rocks, stones, arrowheads, and animal skeletons found on the ranch.
Everything was built “in the old ways,” according to the owner, a scientist who has loved this land and has honored the 20,000 years of history that Native Americans inhabited it. Under his stewardship, the property has won a conservation award for its work pruning away such invasive, non-native species as Russian olive and salt cedar trees; other than that, the property has been left as nature intended and has been disturbed very little.
Claudia Mardel
, Keller Williams Santa Fe
