Bonanza City

Bonanza City is a ghost town, located 13 miles southwest of Santa Fe in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, United States. The town was founded in 1880 as a mining town, following the discovery of gold and silver in the nearby Cerrillos Hills. It was later abandoned sometime in the early 1900s. Later in the twentieth century, The Bonanza Creek Movie Ranch, which contains a movie set depicting a late 19th century mining town, was built near the ruins of Bonanza City. Kid Nation, a 2007 television series taking place in a fictionalized version of Bonanza City, was filmed on the movie ranch.

The Cerrillos Hills are a grouping of hills in modern-day New Mexico containing deposits of valuable resources including silver, gold, lead, copper, and turquoise. The Pueblo have mined for turquoise in the hills as early as the 900s AD. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the colonizing Spanish used Pueblo slave labor to mine turquoise, as well as lead and silver. In 1680, the Pueblo revolted against the Spanish and temporarily drove them from Santa Fe de Nuevo México ; with the exception of a few sporadic mining operations, wide-scale mining would not occur again until the late 1800s.

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