The history of Bishop’s Lodge Resort is inexorably tied to the history of Santa Fe and it surrounding landscape. Little Tesuque Valley, nestled within the pink and orange foothills of Santa Fe’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains, was first traversed by the ancestors of today’s Pueblo Indians (chipped flints and broken bits of pottery still turn up along old trails below North Lodge).

When, in 1540, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado led an expedition of Spanish Conquistadors into the “New” Mexico searching for the “Seven Cities of Gold,” all he found for his troubles were mud-walled villages. Much disappointed, the Spanish did not return to settle until 1598; La Villa Real de Santa Fe de San Francisco de Assisi was founded in 1610. The first know Spanish settler at what is now Bishop’s Lodge was Urbano Montano. On later occasions the land passed on, in succession, to Juan de Lesdema, Mara Francisca de Sena, Pedro Domingues and Navidad Romero. The gray, gnarled skeleton of a 300-year-old tree that graces the final curve of the Lode driveway, indicates that these Spanish settlers first introduced fruit trees to the region. Affectionately known as “The Old Apricot,” the tree succumbed to a hard freeze a few decades ago, and remains a much-admired relic from the Colonial era. Though a few beaver trappers may have wandered through on occasion, the Little Tesuque Valley remained removed from the region’s volatile events: Mexico’s long fight with Spain for independence, Mexico’s bitter loss of Texas, and finally, Mexico’s cessation of New Mexico to the United States after the Mexican war in 1846.

The Vatican chose a young French missionary priest Jean Baptiste Lamy as the first bishop for its newly created diocese for the American Southwest. When he arrived, he was well met by the people but not by the local clergy, who refused to recognize his documents. To resolve the impasse, he set off into Mexico to find the intransigent priest’s former Mexican bishop and slowly the tide turned. In his lifetime Lamy worked for the welfare of all within his “Desert Diocese”—Indian, Hispanic and Anglo-American, establishing the region’s first schools and a hospital. The Loretto Chapel and St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe reflect his efforts to bring finer architecture to what was then thought to be an architecturally impoverished area. Over the years, as he traversed his diocese, bringing improvements and humane necessities to the territory, Bishop Lamy also worked on his little ranch, the Villa Pintores. Lamy’s original chapel and his gardens remain much as they did when he first built them on what is now Lodge property, and the refurbishing process embraced his view by parsing out the 111 rooms across 15 separate buildings, inviting the Lodge guests to wander the terrain and experience the inspiration that made the Bishop’s Lodge Resort his choice retreat.