Santa Fe, Taos & the High Desert

Santa Fe sits at 7,000 feet in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a position that is not incidental. The high desert elevation kept the city cool enough to be habitable, far enough from the Rio Grande bottomlands to be defensible, and close enough to the trade routes threading south toward Mexico City and northeast toward Missouri to be indispensable. Before the Spanish arrived, the Tewa called this place Oghá P'o'oge and built a settlement centered on what is now the Plaza. They had abandoned it by the time Pedro de Peralta arrived in 1607 to found a new colonial capital — but the site they chose endured, and so did the logic of choosing it.

Peralta laid out the city according to the Laws of the Indies, King Philip II's 1573 town-planning ordinances: a central plaza, a Palace of the Governors on the north side, a church to the east. That geometry still organizes downtown Santa Fe today. In 1610, the city was formally designated capital of Nuevo México, a title it has held through Spanish, Mexican, and American administrations — making it the oldest state capital in the United States and the earliest European settlement west of the Mississippi River. The trade routes followed: El Camino Real ran south to Mexico City; the Santa Fe Trail, opened in the 1820s, brought commercial traffic from Missouri. The city became the place where Spanish colonial ambition, Indigenous Pueblo civilization, and the expanding American frontier all came to negotiate.

That negotiation was not peaceful. In 1680, Pueblo peoples — long excluded from representation in the colonial government — drove the Spanish out of New Mexico entirely in what is known as the Pueblo Revolt. The Pueblo people governed from the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe for twelve years. The Spanish returned in 1692 under Diego de Vargas. What emerged from that rupture and its aftermath was something more complicated than simple reconquest: subsequent governors, including Francisco Cuervo y Valdez, worked to broker arrangements with Pueblo communities, and the city's founding architecture — the adobe, the plaza, the flat roofline — was always already a synthesis rather than a pure import.

The railroad that arrived in the region in 1880 bypassed Santa Fe in favor of the easier grade through Lamy, to the south. The city lost population and economic momentum. What saved it, and ultimately defined it, was the decision early-20th-century civic leaders made in response to that decline: instead of chasing industrial growth, they institutionalized what they had. Archaeologist Edgar Lee Hewett founded the School of American Research in 1907 and began the Santa Fe Indian Market in 1922. After statehood in 1912, city planners enacted the Pueblo Revival architectural code — requiring new buildings to reflect the adobe aesthetic of the old settlement — and that code has held. Writers and artists followed, drawn by the landscape, the cultural density, and the dry altitude. The names stack up: D.H. Lawrence, Cormac McCarthy, Tony Hillerman, Rudolfo Anaya. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum now anchors a city with more than 250 galleries. In 2005, Santa Fe became the first American city inducted into the UNESCO Creative Cities Network.

What those forces made is a city that held its character across four centuries of political transfer — Spanish, Mexican, American — and emerged as something none of those administrations fully intended. One-tenth of Santa Fe's employment connects to artistic and cultural industries. Writers and authors make up the highest proportion of the labor force of any U.S. city. The Palace of the Governors, where the Pueblo people governed after the 1680 revolt and where Spanish colonists governed before and after, still stands on the north side of the Plaza. The oldest state capital in the country is not a museum. It is still in session.