Watermelon Mountains

The defining feature of New Mexico's largest city is the Sandia Mountains. The imposing range looms over Albuquerque, blocking everything to the east.

It's a view I love to see as we come home from a long California road trip. Interstate 40 crests at the top of a hill and there suddenly in the distance are the Sandias, letting us know home is just an hour away. We head straight at the big mountains, cross the Rio Grande and then turn left in Albuquerque to go north to Santa Fe. 

Home.

Did you know that the TV series Breaking Bad was written to take place in Southern California? But it was shot in Albuquerque, where the film industry is big and a lot of TV gets done. The cameras couldn't avoid the imposing views of that big mountain range, it was in every outdoor shot, easily identifiable.

So they re-wrote the script to have Walter White and Jesse Pinkman live where the mountains are, in New Mexico. The rest is TV history. You can visit all the shooting locations of Breaking Bad if you want to. Albuquerque erected bronze statues of the actors this year. Really. New Mexico is unsettlingly strange that way.

But back to the Sandias. They are beautiful when lit by the sun and at times can be distinctly rose red colored. That's how they got the name Sandia. It means watermelon in Spanish.

To my ears the name Sandia Mountains sounds melodic. To a Spanish speaker it must sound odd. Calling this massive rock formation "the watermelon mountains" is so reductive. A pink fruit? A big round melon?

In Santa Fe at times we get the same pink light on the Rocky Mountains to our east, and the Spanish name for our mountain range is Sangre de Cristo Mountains, or Christ's Blood. Now that is a majestic, deeply historic, evocative way to name a commanding landscape. The Spanish explorers were awed and the name reflects that.

I understand the reference to sandias -- watermelons -- it's the rosy pink color the light creates. Some say the name comes from the nearby native pueblo, who the Spanish named "Sandias" because they were growing gourds that looked like watermelons and the name of the people transferred to the area mountains.  

Either way the name of a pink melon does not do historic or emotional justice to the skyline that dominates Albuquerque, that creates whole fictional visual worlds, and that welcomes us home from a long tiring drive.