Talpa, NM

Talpa is a Taos County census-designated place six miles south of Taos along New Mexico Highway 518, where the Río Chiquito runs through an old Hispanic settlement. The 2020 census counted 960 residents. The place was first called Río Chiquito and sits on the old Spanish land grant of Don Cristóbal de la Sena. Families were settling here in the early 1700s, and the name Talpa may connect to a Mexican shrine or to the Taos family's Talpa Romero. The Duran Chapel once stood beside the river and remains central to Talpa's sense of place even after the original adobe building disappeared.

Acequia water still shapes fields and gardens, and the Talpa Community Center gives the small settlement a gathering place for classes, celebrations, and local projects. Taos is close enough for daily errands, but Talpa keeps its own older rhythm of acequia gates, cottonwoods, adobe walls, and mountain light. Talpa's local scoop is a northern New Mexico river village where Spanish land-grant history, water-sharing traditions, and Taos's wider orbit meet.