Añal is a

ghost town A ghost town, deserted city, extinct town, or abandoned city is an abandoned settlement, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economi ...

in De Baca County, in the U.S. state of

New Mexico New Mexico is a state in the Southwestern United States, Southwestern region of the United States. It is one of the Mountain States of the southern Rocky Mountains, sharing the Four Corners region with Utah, Colorado, and Arizona. It also ...

. Añal was located between Alamo and

Fort Sumner Fort Sumner was a Fortification, military fort in New Mexico Territory charged with the internment of Navajo and Mescalero, Mescalero Apache populations from 1863 to 1868 at nearby Bosque Redondo. History On October 31, 1862, Congress of the ...

, on the Arroyo de Añil — a tributary of the

Pecos River The Pecos River ( ; ) originates in north-central New Mexico and flows into Texas, emptying into the Rio Grande. Its headwaters are on the eastern slope of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range in Mora County north of Pecos, New Mexico, at an elev ...

— after which it is named, but the town's precise location is unknown to the

GNIS The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is a database of name and location information about more than two million physical and cultural features, encompassing the United States and its territories; the associated states of the Marshal ...

Etymology

The etymon 'añil' refers to sunflowers in

New Mexican Spanish New Mexican Spanish (), or New Mexican and Southern Colorado Spanish refers to certain traditional varieties of Spanish language in the United States, Spanish spoken in the United States in New Mexico and southern Colorado, which are different ...

. A post office called Anal ( without the tilde) was established in 1916, and remained in operation until 1934. It was an unknown postmaster who first transcribed the name without i, according to an

eye dialect Eye dialect is a writer's use of deliberately nonstandard spelling either because they do not consider the standard spelling a good reflection of the pronunciation or because they are intending to portray vernacular, informal or low-status language ...

References

Geography of De Baca County, New Mexico Ghost towns in New Mexico {{NewMexico-geo-stub