Santa Fe Municipal

Founded by Spanish colonists around 1610, Santa Fe is the oldest state capital in the United States and the highest, at 7,200 feet. On its central Plaza stands the Palace of the Governors, the oldest continuously occupied public building in the country, where Pueblo artisans still sell jewelry under the portal as they have for generations. The whole city is a deliberate work of architecture: a 1957 ordinance requires new buildings downtown to follow "Santa Fe Style" — earth-toned adobe or stucco, flat roofs, rounded edges — so the city keeps a unified pueblo-and-Spanish-colonial look found nowhere else. It became an art colony in the early 1900s (Georgia O'Keeffe made the surrounding desert world-famous), and Canyon Road is one of the densest concentrations of art galleries in the country.

In Frijoles Canyon, below the Pajarito Plateau, the Ancestral Puebloans carved homes into the soft volcanic tuff between roughly 1150 and 1550 AD — natural cavates enlarged by hand, fronted by masonry rooms, reached today by climbing wooden ladders up the canyon wall just as the original residents did. The Alcove House sits 140 feet above the canyon floor, up four ladders, in a huge natural cave with a reconstructed kiva. The tuff itself came from the same supervolcano that formed the Valles Caldera next door — one of the largest volcanic craters on Earth. And on the mesa just above Bandelier sits Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was built; the scientists hiked these ancient canyons on their days off.

Just outside Kirtland AFB / KABQ. The Smithsonian-affiliated museum tells the full story of the Manhattan Project, the Cold War nuclear arms race, and the development of America's nuclear weapons — from Trinity to Bikini to today. Outdoor Heritage Park has the actual aircraft: a B-29 Superfortress, B-52 Stratofortress, F-105 Thunderchief, and a Polaris missile. The exhibits include the actual Fat Man and Little Boy casings (real ones, but inert), the bomb hooks the 509th Composite Group used, and Robert Oppenheimer's telegrams. Difficult, important, sobering.

Taos Pueblo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States — the multistory adobe houses of Hlauuma (North House) and Hlaukwima (South House) have been lived in for over 1,000 years, and people of the Taos tribe still live there today without electricity or running water in the historic core, by choice, to preserve the old ways. The walls are adobe — earth, water, and straw — replastered by hand each year, glowing gold to deep red as the light shifts. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a living community, not a museum. The pueblo sits at the foot of the sacred Taos Mountain, with the surrounding town of Taos long an art colony, drawing painters to the extraordinary northern-New-Mexico light.