The Santo Niño appears everywhere. The small child Christ — not the infant, not the man sacrificed for our sins, but the traveling child, filled with self-assurance and optimism of a young pilgrim. He watches over the sick and infirm who pass through hoping to touch the holy dirt. The story begins centuries earlier, in Moorish Spain, with prisoners, night journeys, and a child who walks barefoot bringing food and comfort where adults were forbidden to go. That story crosses oceans. It moves north. And here, in this quiet valley, it abides.

The pit of holy dirt sits quietly inside the sanctuary. It reflects an indigenous understanding of land as healing, later enclosed by Catholic ritual. Institutions change. The soil does not.

Just off the main road, slightly back from the square, we find the gallery. Patricio J. Chavez keeps it understated. Soft light. Spare shelves. And there, laid out without ceremony, are the chiles — full red Chimayó pods bagged simply, a sight to behold. They seem to glow when turned, sparkling as if dusted with flakes of fool’s gold. Thin-skinned. Dense. Purpose-built by constraint.

He has green Chimayó too — verde powder, rare and fleeting, caught at a moment most people never see. It smells bright and deep at once, like something harvested early because it knows the season is narrow. Roasted and cured by air-drying.

Chimayó was established by Spanish settlers in the late seventeenth century, part of the northernmost reach of colonial New Spain. After the indigenous Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Spanish authority withdrew from the region entirely, leaving small settlements and forts to fend for themselves. Decades later, people returned. The town endured — passing from Spain to the Mexican Republic, and then to the United States, each shift of power leaving layers behind. It’s not unusual here for people to speak with pride about their Spanish heritage, a distinction that feels both deeply personal and historically unstable in a place shaped by successive empires, none of which stayed cleanly put.

The church sits nearby, formed of the kind of gnarled wooden beams Disney would love to have copied (and maybe did). Built in 1816, it rises over ground that was already then believed to heal. Inside, the walls are crowded with offerings: photographs, handwritten notes, crutches, and shoes — hundreds of them — old and new, child-sized and worn thin, hung in rows and clusters. Shoes marking passage. Shoes marking return. Shoes as evidence that a body made it through.

It’s impossible not to think of other walls of shoes, other histories where movement and survival were counted this same way. Here, the meaning is safe passage. A journey completed. A body carried through, coat on its back, shoes still intact.

When we give Patricio a small dropper of our tincture, made just up the road in Nambé, he turns it once in the light and talks about how the chile changes when it leaves the valley — how the sweetness goes first, how the edges sharpen, how it forgets itself. After a few generations elsewhere, he says, the walls thicken, the heat climbs, and the flavor thins. The chile survives. The character doesn’t.

The Spanish carried chile here centuries ago from deeper in the New World, already ancient by the time it reached this valley. Over the next four hundred years it learned this place slowly. The unusually long days at altitude. The late-season sun. The narrow window between ripening and frost. It adapted by becoming thinner-skinned, sweeter, more precise.

The Santo Niño presides. The child god. The pilgrim. And outside, in the same valley, the chile makes its own crossing.

Later, it feels less like an exchange than a loop closing. The church sanctifies the soil one way. The chile does it another. Both remain. Both are worked by hand. And both make the same quiet claim:

What endures is not what travels farthest, but what survives by belonging.