Next up in Colorado land wars: A billionaire’s planned housing compound in the mountains above the San Luis Valley faces off against a rancher’s flock of grazing sheep.
The battle will play out this week in a multiday hearing in a courtroom in Costilla County, where an appointed “special master” will have to side either with an oil heir who wants to build a new, private home and multiple outbuildings on his property, or the ancestors of the original settlers of the valley who argue they have a 182-year-old right to use the land.
The hearing is the latest in one of Colorado’s longest-running land disputes, Lobato v. Taylor, a lawsuit filed in 1981 against a former owner of the Cielo Vista Ranch. The case is based on a land grant far older than that — the Sangre de Cristo Grant of 1844, when Mexico granted the land to encourage settlement in the valley. Farmers and ranchers who settled in the valley before Colorado was even a state, along with their descendants, are allowed to enter the landscape they call “La Sierra” to gather firewood and graze their livestock.
The case about the new home is different from litigation over the 8-foot-tall fence that the ranch owner began constructing in 2020 around Cielo Vista Ranch, which is 130 square miles containing 18 mountains higher than 13,000 feet and the 14,053-foot Culebra Peak.
The hearing, scheduled for Tuesday-Friday, focuses on a request by ranch owner William Harrison for a 233.6-acre “buffer zone” around the new house he hopes to build, a zone that land grantees could not cross. He argues the buffer is not just for privacy but for his own safety, and has requested that the drawings of the home and its outbuildings remain private.
Photos of the planned construction show the layout of the home, “locations of the various outbuildings,” and the location of the windows — details that people could use to “harm Mr. Harrison,” the ranch’s attorneys argued in court filings. They are asking that the special master keep the drawings out of the public record.
As evidence that Harrison is a potential target, the attorneys included a social media message from one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Shirley Romero-Otero, who said she planned to attend this week’s hearing and wrote “La Lucha Sigue,” or the fight continues, in Spanish.
Attorneys for Romero and the dozens of locals fighting the buffer zone say the message is “not a threat of violence” or intimidation, but a “common Spanish slogan” to rally the community in the “decades-long legal battle.”
They argue that a 233-acre buffer zone on the upper part of the ranch will severely restrict people’s access to the land, including to gather wood and graze livestock. A sheep owner who takes his flock to the mountain is a key witness in the case.
If people are prevented from crossing the buffer zone, they will no longer have access to about 2,000 acres, argue local groups called the La Sierra Environmental Guardians and the Land Rights Council. The proposed buffer zone includes a large meadow below Lomo Liso Mountain, the best grazing in the area and used for decades to feed cattle and sheep, they said.
The communal use of La Sierra traces back to the tradition of Mexican settlers.
The high-alpine forest and rivers of the area first made it an abundant hunting ground for the Ute, Apache and other native people. Mexico, which owned the region in 1844 and wanted to encourage settlement, awarded the Sangre de Cristo land grant to two men, both of whom died three years later. One of the men’s fathers, Carlos Beaubien, bought the land grant after their deaths, and controlled the entire 1.4 million acres. Beaubien recruited farmers, ranchers and merchants to settle in the valley, including about 100 families who established the town of San Luis, which is where this week’s hearing takes place.
Settlers each got a plot of desert land with access to an acequia irrigation ditch, and they were allowed to go into the high country to harvest timber, hunt deer and elk, and graze their cattle and sheep. In 1848, at the end of the Mexican-American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo required Mexico to turn over the grant to the United States.
The arrangement for the heirs of the land grant has remained mostly in place, even as wealthy men have purchased the land, but not without massive court battles.
Today, the heirs have keys to nine locked gates on roads into the property.
In recent years, heirs have battled the current ranch owner on multiple fronts, most notably on the fence that was halted by court injunction in 2023 after about 20 miles of fenceline were erected. Another dispute centered on the right of the ranch to use drones and cameras to make sure heirs are using the land for legitimate reasons. Harrison, who bought the ranch in 2017 after it was listed for $105 million, argued that he began building the fence to contain his bison herd and because trespassers had dumped trash, collected antlers, fished illegally and driven ATVs on his property.
In 2022, retired District Judge Kenneth M. Plotz appointed a special master to sort out disputes between the ranch owner and the thousands of land grant heirs. At a hearing in 2024, the ranch’s attorneys said there had been threats against Harrison and his ranch manager, which is why they said they needed a private buffer zone around the new home.