Destination
Type of Activity
Editors Pick
Read MoreAllan Houser Gallery
Allan Houser was a very important Native artist, and there is a gallery featuring his work in downtown Santa Fe. If you have time, it’s worth making an appointment at the Compound (sculpture gardens, studio house archives and gallery), about...
Read MoreBandelier National Monument
This 33,000-acre park contains more than seventy miles of hiking trails, from short walks along well-groomed paths (including the 1.2-mile Main Loop Trail, which snakes through archeological excavations) to hours-long, challenging excursions into the backcountry. One of the main attractions...
Read MoreGeorgia O’Keeffe Ghost Ranch & Abiquiu Studio Tour
Art aficionados should not miss a visit to Georgia O’Keeffe country, i.e., the red-rock landscapes around Abiquiu that the artist first visited in 1929. O’Keefe lived here permanently from 1949 until failing health forced a move to Santa Fe, where...
Read MoreGeorgia O’Keeffe Museum
This exquisite museum, opened in 1997, is a small but powerful testament to the legacy of one of the United States’ most pioneering artists. A selection of the 3,000 works owned by the museum is shown within a handful of...
Read MoreKasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks
This national monument, forty miles southwest of Santa Fe, looks like the backdrop for a movie that’s set on a distant planet: giant cone- and mushroom-shaped rock formations soar into the sky (the region owes its unique geology to thick...
Read MoreLoretto Chapel
This Gothic Revival chapel, completed in 1878 and two blocks south of the Plaza, has become extremely commercial (its website has an entire section devoted to wedding packages, which are, incidentally, not inexpensive), but it’s worth a short stop to...
Read MoreMuseum of Contemporary Native Arts
This museum is part of the Institute of American Indian Arts, a college that offers undergraduate degrees in museum studies, creative writing, new media arts and indigenous liberal studies. With some 7,000 works, it holds the world’s largest collection of...
Read MoreMuseum of International Folk Art
This trove of all things handcrafted is entered through a main exhibition hall, presenting some 10,000 objects from more than one hundred countries – the world’s largest collection of international folk art. It’s a wonderful museum to explore with kids, thanks...
Read MoreNew Mexico History Museum
On the historic plaza and adjacent to the Palace of the Governors, this museum gives a high-tech, in-depth overview of the state’s long and complex history. Plan to spend some time here: the main exhibition, “Telling New Mexico–Stories From Then...
Read MorePuye Cliffs
Puye Cliffs offers a fascinating glimpse into the history of the native Pueblo people, who lived, farmed and hunted in this area as early as the 1100s. Located a thirty-minute drive north of Santa Fe, Puye Cliffs consists of two...
Read MoreRailyard District
When visiting the Railyard District, don’t miss these galleries on Paseo de Peralta: SITE (No. 1606; 505-989-1199; sitesantafe.org), the gallery that launched them all; Tai (No. 1601B; 505-984-1387; www.taigallery.com), a smaller space dedicated to Japanese bamboo art and traditional Asian...
Read MoreSanta Fe Opera
The Santa Fe Opera was founded by the late conductor John Crosby in 1957, and its annual season is today considered one of the country’s most exciting musical events. Up-and-coming singers hone their skills here before big-city debuts, and the...
Read MoreSantuario de Chimayó
En route to Taos (or Bandelier National Monument), visitors interested in religious history should make the short, scenic detour to the Santuario de Chimayó. A 30-minute drive north of Santa Fe, this Roman Catholic church, completed in 1816, draws thousands...
Read MoreShidoni Foundry & Galleries
This sculpture garden, a scenic, ten-minute drive north of Santa Fe, is worth a visit on Saturday afternoon, when the foundry is open to the public and guests can watch bronze heated to 2,000 degrees being poured into molds. Before...
Read MoreTen Thousand Waves
Says a longtime visitor to Santa Fe of this Japanese-style spa in the hills outside town: “When I first went there, years ago, it was all about the experience, and the treatments, setting and ambience were very special. Today it’s...
Read MoreTurquoise Trail
Take a drive down Highway 14 between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and discover ghost towns that have remained untouched for decades. Cerrillos is home to the quirky and fascinating Turquoise Mining Museum within the Casa Grande Trading Post (17 Waldo...
Photo Addison Doty, Courtesy Wheelwright MuseumRead MoreWheelwright Museum of the American Indian
New Mexico’s oldest private nonprofit museum was founded in 1937 by intrepid, Boston-born Mary Cabot Wheelwright, who had a lifelong interest in religion and Native American culture. In 1921 she was introduced to a Navajo singer and medicine man named...
