Albuquerque, NM news and local guide

Francisco Cuervo y Valdes founded La Villa de Alburquerque in 1706 as an outpost of Spanish New Mexico. He named it for the Viceroy, the 10th Duke of Alburquerque. The town lived by farming and sheep and was a trading and military post on the Camino Real. It was laid out in the Spanish villa pattern around a central plaza, preserved today as Old Town, where San Felipe de Neri Church, built in 1793, is one of the oldest buildings in the city. Mexico stationed troops there after independence in 1821. After the American takeover, the Army kept a post and supply depot in Albuquerque from 1846 to 1867, and in 1859 a traveler counted 3,000 residents. Confederate troops under General Henry Hopkins Sibley occupied the town for about a month in 1862. On April 8, 1862, during his retreat, he fought the long-range Battle of Albuquerque against Union troops under Colonel Edward R.S. Canby. When the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad arrived in 1880, it put its depot about 2 miles east of the plaza, and New Town, now downtown, grew up around it. On July 4, 1882, Park Van Tassel made the first balloon flight in New Mexico Territory there. Sources Wikipedia: Albuquerque, New Mexico