Abandoned Spanish Mission at Quarai

South of Albuquerque one and a half hours is a dispersed complex of well-made, but now abandoned, mission churches and accompanying occupation sites for pre-contact native peoples. As the forces of nature and man around them changed, the pressures on these occupation sites increased, with difficulty maintaining crops increasing alongside more and more raiding by mobile cultures such as the Comanches, Apaches, and Utes. At the larger mission, Gan Quivira, there has long been rumored to be treasure buried by the priests retreating from the site, though no treasure has been known to be recovered. Other areas around Manzano have various treasure stories, including the recovery of a locked chest from a local pond as well as stories of rich, obscured mines in the nearby Manzano mountains.