Lisboa Springs Fish Hatchery

The raceways at Lisboa Springs run in Pecos Canyon, one mile north of the village of Pecos and about 25 miles east of Santa Fe, at an elevation of about 7,100 feet. A self-guided tour leads past trout at their various growth stages. The hatchery raises about 136,000 catchable-sized rainbow trout a year. The waters it normally stocks include Monastery Lake, Cowles Ponds, and the Pecos River, which also takes the hatchery’s discharge. The state calls Lisboa Springs its oldest hatchery, and the New Mexico Department of Wildlife runs it as one of six. Visitors are welcome during business hours.

The water comes from the spring on the grounds and is supplemented with well water. Birders come to the grounds as well. On eBird the hatchery is a hotspot with 58 species on record, and observers filed checklists there through the spring and summer of 2026.

Managers and the raceways

The hatchery raises its trout in two sections of raceways. In 2015 that arrangement let the department drain and disinfect one section while the other kept producing. Francina Martinez-Valencia, who started out as a fish culturist, has managed Lisboa Springs. She was the first woman to manage a state hatchery in New Mexico and oversaw six other hatchery specialists. Eloy Trujillo appears as manager in the department’s account of its six hatcheries. Scott Bernard, also a manager here, has spoken about the switch to sterile female triploid trout eggs and about raising bigger fish. Rainbow trout in the state system are bred as all-triploid females that cannot reproduce, which protects wild native fish from hybridizing with them. Michael Sloane began his career with the department at this hatchery and later became its director.

State Hatchery No. 1

Calls for a trout hatchery predate statehood. The Territorial Game Warden recommended one before New Mexico became a state in 1912. Trinidad C de Baca, the first state game warden, asked for a fishing license fee so that money would be available to develop a hatchery at the springs. The 1915 Legislature created a resident fishing license that exempted people fishing for trout. Thomas P. Gable, State Game and Fish Warden, wrote to Governor Merrit C. Mechem in his 1921–1922 report: “At each Legislative session since 1909, when I first held the position of Game Warden, I have made an effort to secure legislation covering the establishment of a fish hatchery.”

The 1921 Legislature passed the act, funded from the gasoline tax. Gable put the sum at $30,000. A later department account says the legislature approved and appropriated an initial $15,000, with a promise of another $15,000 the following year. The Game Commission looked at several sites and settled, in Gable’s words, on “the purchase of the Lisboa Springs, about eight miles from Glorieta, formerly a part of the Valley Ranch, on Pecos river.” Until then, fish had come into New Mexico by train, likely from Colorado. With the new hatchery the Department of Game and Fish could raise its own.

It opened as New Mexico State Hatchery No. 1 and was considered a model hatchery at the time. John P. Bengard was its superintendent. He had 12 years of experience in fish culture in Colorado, and he stayed until his death in 1944 at the age of 76. Roy E. Barker, chief of the Fisheries Division, wrote in 1962 that Bengard’s knowledge “has been the basis for many of our trout culture techniques in New Mexico.” Roddy Gallegos, the department’s assistant chief over hatcheries, said: “The first fish were referred to as black-spotted trout, which the Department believes was the Rio Grande Cutthroat trout.” A Colorado State University environmental history of the Pecos records that from 1921 the state also released brown and rainbow trout into the river. After those non-native species arrived, the river’s Rio Grande cutthroat declined sharply.

The early output was almost all fry and fingerlings. Barker figured that about 2,500 pounds of trout were planted in 1921. If the 1,922,000 fish of that first year averaged an inch and a half, he wrote, that is all they would have weighed. Counts in those years were loose. Until about 1940, any planting of 1,000 or more fish was recorded with its last three digits as zeros. In 1929, it was reported, Lisboa Springs and the newly formed Taos hatchery lost 300,000 fingerling trout. Distance was another limit. Hauling fish 300 miles from Pecos over the dirt roads of the 1920s to Gila Wilderness streams, and then packing them twenty miles or more, was impossible, so the state built a hatchery in the Gila in 1923. By the 1960–1961 fiscal year Lisboa Springs planted 1,119,729 rainbow, brown, and cutthroat trout weighing 57,372 pounds, and 182,097 of them were nine inches long.

A lake for the Oppenheimers

The best-known story about the hatchery reached print secondhand. A Pecos columnist wrote that Elliott Barker, long-time chief of New Mexico Game and Fish, told it to him. In Barker’s telling, the foreman at Lisboa Springs telephoned to say the Oppenheimer brothers wanted trout for a new lake they had just discovered. Robert Oppenheimer was put on the line to ask. Barker gave the brothers fish from the hatchery, and they carried them to the lake. That was the first stocking of Lake Katherine, in 1932.

Fill from the Terrero mine

Eleven miles upstream lies the Terrero mine. It saw large-scale mining from 1927 to 1939 and was among the largest lead and zinc producers in the United States. A 2015 briefing by the state environment department’s chief scientist, Dennis McQuillan, says the Pecos River and the hatchery had a history of major fish kills that coincided with runoff in the watershed. High zinc and aluminum are believed to have been at least partly responsible. Until the 1970s, waste from the mine and from the El Molino mill was used as fill for roads, campgrounds, a trailhead, and at the hatchery itself.

Spring runoff in 1991 brought the worst of it. The state briefing counts more than 90,000 trout dead at the hatchery alone. Another account names sulfuric acid, aluminum, and zinc, and puts the loss at 90,000 Rio Grande cutthroat trout at the hatchery and another 10,000 in the river. The kill drew attention to the mine and mill, and restoration began that year. On December 2, 1992, the Department of Game and Fish and other parties signed an Administrative Order on Consent covering the mine, the mill, the campgrounds, the roads, and the Lisboa Fish Hatchery. According to the briefing, no fish kills attributable to the Terrero mine have occurred since the mid-1990s.

Covers on the raceways

Whirling disease was found at the hatchery in 1999. One department account says more than 200,000 hatchery trout were destroyed to slow the disease’s spread into New Mexico waters. For years afterward Lisboa Springs used only half its raceways. The sixteen that had drawn water from the infected Pecos River were converted to spring or well water. In 2008 the state system stocked more than a million rainbow trout of nine inches or longer while Lisboa Springs ran at half capacity. Gallegos said at the time: “We’re continually modifying the riverside raceways to keep out the raccoons, birds and other predators that spread disease. Getting the riverside operation back on line will make a big difference.” The renovation covered the raceways and re-piped water into the hatchery from underground springs.

Routine testing in early February 2015 found bacterial kidney disease in one of the two sections. More than 160,000 small rainbow trout, three to nine inches long, were removed and destroyed. Production fell by about half while the section was drained, disinfected, and restocked, a process the department said could take up to two years. “That’s why we do this testing to ensure we are raising strong, healthy fish for the public to catch and eat,” said Mike Sloane, then the department’s fisheries chief. The disease poses no threat to humans, he said, and added: “It’s a little like catching the common flu for them, but in some instances it can be catastrophic to a population of fish.”