Iałopháybo

Iałopháybo, "at the red willows" in the Taos language, is the pueblo that Spaniards called Taos, set on a stream running down from the Sangre de Cristo to the foothills. The Taos people, who speak a northern Tiwa language, settled this valley around 900 CE, and their oldest standing building dates to about 1000. Multistorey adobe houses rose on either side of the stream in the late 1200s and early 1300s. Each autumn, after the harvest, a trade fair here brought peoples of the plains and of the Rio Grande together to trade, and Taos was the most populous of the Pueblo towns in the 1540s.

Members of Coronado's expedition reached it in 1540. Around 1620 Spanish friars oversaw the building of the mission church of San Geronimo, which the Taos people resisted; by 1660 they had killed the resident priest and wrecked the church. In 1680 Taos was the headquarters of the great Pueblo Revolt, and the leader Po'pay made it the capital of the Pueblo republic that expelled the Spanish from New Mexico. Spain returned in the 1690s, and in the following century Taos traded heavily with the Comanche on the plains, even as Blue Lake in the mountains remained the sacred place from which its people say they came.