Buying Land in Mora County, New Mexico

The Mora Land Grant: a community grant whose common lands were legally taken, not just contested

Mora County is built on the Mora Land Grant -- formally La Merced de Santa Gertrudis de lo de Mora -- a Mexican-era community grant of more than 800,000 acres made in 1835 to a group of settlers by Governor Albino Pérez. As with most Hispanic community land grants of this era, the great majority of the grant's acreage was designated common land, meant for shared use by all grant residents rather than divided among individual owners. After the U.S. acquired the territory, the U.S. General Land Office confirmed the grant in 1876 in the name of the 76 original grantees "and their heirs and assigns" -- language land speculators then used to argue that the grantees, not the resident community as a body, individually owned the commons. That legal reframing let speculators acquire and consolidate the common lands over the following decades; disputes between speculators and grant residents were frequent, and the former common lands were ultimately auctioned off to the highest bidders in 1916, ending the era of shared use.

This is not settled folklore -- the Mora Land Grant still exists today as a political subdivision of the State of New Mexico, managed by an elected board of trustees on behalf of grant heirs, and it is registered with the New Mexico Land Grant Council, the state body that maintains New Mexico's land grant registry. None of this means land connected to the grant can't be bought and sold today -- most privately held land in the county routinely is. But a parcel whose chain of title traces back through the original 1835 grant, rather than through an unambiguous later federal patent, deserves more scrutiny than a routine title search might catch. Have a title company or real estate attorney experienced specifically in New Mexico land-grant title work confirm whether a given parcel connects to the Mora grant and whether any grant-heir or common-land claim remains open against it.

Oil and gas: a first-in-the-nation ban, struck down, and a still-contested successor policy

In April 2013, Mora County became the first county in the United States to adopt an outright ban on oil and gas extraction within its borders -- the Mora County Community Water Rights and Local Self-Government Ordinance, drafted with help from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which asserted a local "rights of nature" and community bill of rights framework and prohibited fracking and other oil and gas activity as violations of those rights. Landowners backed by oil and gas interests, along with a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell (SWEPI, LP), sued. In a January 2015 ruling (SWEPI, LP v. Mora County), a federal district judge invalidated the ordinance, finding it violated the U.S. Constitution's Supremacy Clause by conflicting with federal law and that portions of it were unconstitutionally overbroad under the First Amendment.

The county's response was to shift strategy: rather than a direct ban, Mora adopted a Comprehensive Land Use Plan in 2018, alongside a Zoning and Subdivision Regulation (replacing the county's earlier 1995 Development Guidance System), aimed at restricting oil, gas, and mining development through land-use review rather than an outright prohibition. That 2018 framework is not settled history either -- as recently as December 2025, a proposal by the county's Planning and Zoning Committee to remove a single sentence from the 2018 land use policy drew significant community pushback over fears it would weaken protections against mineral development, a district-court petition seeking to block a vote, and a special county commission meeting on the measure that was ultimately canceled when two commissioners did not attend. As of this writing there is no enforceable countywide ban on oil, gas, or mining activity in Mora County, and the land-use protections that do exist are under live political and legal contest -- get the current, in-force text of the county's land-use regulations directly from the Planning & Zoning Committee before assuming either that drilling is banned or that it is unrestricted.

A real, if quieter, wildfire exposure too

Mora County was itself burned in the 2022 Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire -- the Calf Canyon portion of the fire, sparked by a rekindled U.S. Forest Service pile burn, ignited within Mora County before merging with the Hermits Peak fire and becoming the largest wildfire in New Mexico history. The full treatment of that fire -- its cause, its burn-scar flood and debris-flow risk, and the federal compensation claims process it triggered -- is covered in depth on the San Miguel County page, since that is where the fire originated and caused the most extensive damage. But the exposure is not exclusive to San Miguel: parcels in the burned portions of Mora County carry the same burn-scar and flood-risk considerations, and Mora County landowners with fire-related losses have been eligible for the same federal claims process. If you're evaluating land in the county's burned areas, read the San Miguel County page's fire section and confirm a specific parcel's burn-perimeter and flood-risk status directly rather than assuming this is purely a neighboring-county issue.