Explore The Southwest
Settled in turn by Native Americans, Spaniards, Mexicans and Yankees, NEW MEXICO remains hugely diverse. Each successive group has built upon the legacy of its predecessors; their histories and achievements are intertwined, rather than simply dominated by the white American latecomers.
New Mexico’s indigenous peoples – especially the Pueblo Indians, the heirs of the Ancestral Puebloans – provide a sense of cultural continuity. After the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 forced a temporary Spanish withdrawal into Mexico, the proselytizing padres co-opted the natives without destroying their traditional ways of life, as local deities and celebrations were incorporated into Catholic practice. Somewhat bizarrely to outsiders, grand churches still dominate many Pueblo communities, often adjacent to the underground ceremonial chambers known as kivas.
The Americans who arrived in 1848 saw New Mexico as a useless wasteland. But for a few mining booms and range wars – such as the Lincoln County War, which brought Billy the Kid to fame – New Mexico was relatively undisturbed until it finally became a state in 1912. Since World War II, when the secret Manhattan Project built the first atomic bomb here, it has been home to America’s premier weapons research outposts. By and large, people work close to the land, mining, farming and ranching.
In northern New Mexico, the magnificent Rio Grande Valley cradles both Santa Fe, the adobe-fronted capital and the artists’ colony of Taos, with its nearby pueblo. The broad swath of central New Mexico along I-40 – which succeeded the old Route 66 – pivots around the state’s biggest city, Albuquerque, with the mesa-top Pueblo village of Ácoma (“Sky City”) an hour’s drive west. In wild, wide-open southern New Mexico, deep Carlsbad Caverns are the main attraction, while you can still stumble upon mining and cattle-ranching towns barely changed since the end of the Wild West.
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Santa Fe
Santa Fe
One of America’s oldest and most beautiful cities, SANTA FE was founded by Spanish adventurers and missionaries a decade before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth Rock. Spread across a high plateau at the foot of the stunning Sangre de Cristo mountains, New Mexico’s capital still glories in the adobe houses and baroque churches of its original architects, while its newer museums and galleries attract art-lovers from all over the world. The busiest season is summer, when temperatures usually reach into the eighties Fahrenheit; in winter, the average daytime high is a mere 42°F, though with snow on the mountains the city looks more ravishing than ever.
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Albuquerque
Albuquerque
Sprawling at the heart of New Mexico, where the east–west road and rail routes cross both the Rio Grande and the old road south to Mexico, ALBUQUERQUE is, with half a million people, the state’s only major metropolis. The “Duke City” may have grown a bit fast for comfort, but the original Hispanic settlement is still discernible at its core and its diverse population gives it a rare cultural vibrancy. Even if its architecture is often uninspired, the setting is magnificent, sandwiched between the Rio Grande and the glowing Sandia Mountains. Specific highlights include the intact Spanish plaza, the neon-lit Route 66 frontage of Central Avenue and the excellent Indian Pueblo Cultural Centre, while every October Albuquerque hosts the nation’s largest hot-air balloon rally.
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The Rio Grande Pueblos
The Rio Grande Pueblos
The first Spaniards to explore what’s now New Mexico encountered one hundred thousand so-called Pueblo Indians, living in a hundred villages and towns (pueblo is Spanish for “village”). Resenting the imposition of Catholicism and their virtual enslavement, the various tribes banded together in the 1680 Pueblo Revolt and ousted the entire colonial regime, killing scores of priests and soldiers and sending hundreds more south to Mexico. After the Spanish returned in 1693, the Pueblos showed little further resistance and they have coexisted ever since, accepting aspects of Catholicism – most pueblos hold a large adobe church – without giving up their traditional beliefs and practices. New Mexico is now home to around forty thousand Pueblo Indians; each of its nineteen autonomous pueblos has its own laws and system of government.
The Pueblos celebrate Saints’ days, major Catholic holidays such as Easter and the Epiphany and even the Fourth of July with a combination of Native American traditions and Catholic rituals, featuring elaborately costumed dances and massive communal feasts. The spectacle of hundreds of costumed, body-painted tribal members of all ages, performing elaborate dances in such timeless surroundings, is hugely impressive.
However, few pueblos are quite the tourist attractions they’re touted to be. While the best known, Taos and Ácoma, retain their ancient defensive architecture, the rest tend to be dusty adobe hamlets scattered around a windblown plaza. Unless you arrive on a feast day or are a knowledgeable shopper in search of Pueblo crafts, visits are liable to prove disappointing. In addition, you’ll be made very unwelcome if you fail to behave respectfully – don’t “explore” places that are off-limits to outsiders, such as shrines, kivas or private homes.
Fifteen of the pueblos are concentrated along the Rio Grande north of Albuquerque, with a long-standing division between the seven southern pueblos, south of Santa Fe, most of which speak Keresan and the group to the north, which mostly speak Tewa (pronounced tay-wah). Visitors to each are required to register at a visitor centre; some charge an admission fee of $3 to $10 and those that permit such activities typically charge additional fees of $5 for still photography, $10–15 for video cameras and up to $100 for sketching. There’s no extra charge for feast days or dances, but photography is usually forbidden on special occasions.
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Route 66
Route 66
If you do ever plan to motor west, there’s still one definitive highway that’s the best. Eighty years since it was first completed, seventy since John Steinbeck called it “the mother road, the road of flight” in The Grapes of Wrath and sixty since songwriter Bobby Troup set it all down in rhyme, what better reason to visit the Southwest could there be than to get hip to this timely tip and get your kicks on Route 66?
The heyday of Route 66 as the nation’s premier cross-country route – winding from Chicago to LA – lasted barely twenty years, from its being paved in 1937 until it began to be superseded by freeways in 1957. It was officially rendered defunct in 1984, when Williams, Arizona, became the last town to be bypassed. Nonetheless, substantial stretches of the original Route 66 survive, complete with the motels and drive-ins that became icons of vernacular American architecture. Restored 1950s roadsters and the latest Harley Davisons alike flock to cruise along the atmospheric, neon-lit frontages of towns such as Albuquerque and Flagstaff, or through such empty desertscapes as those between Grants and Gallup in New Mexico or Seligman and Kingman in Arizona.
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Adobe
Adobe
The single most defining feature of New Mexico is its adobe architecture, as seen on homes, churches and even shopping malls and motels. A sun-baked mixture of earth, sand, charcoal and chopped grass or straw, adobe bricks are set with a similar mortar, then plastered over with mud and straw. The soil used dictates the colour of the final building, so subtle variations are apparent everywhere. However, adobe is a far from convenient material: it needs replastering every few years and turns to mud when water seeps up from the ground. These days, most of what looks like adobe is actually painted cement or concrete, but even this looks attractive enough in its own semi-kitsch way, while hunting out such superb genuine adobes as the remote Santuario de Chimayó on the “High Road” between Taos and Santa Fe, the formidable church of San Francisco de Asis in Ranchos de Taos or the multi-tiered dwellings of Taos Pueblo, can provide the focus of an enjoyable New Mexico tour.
