Madrid

Madrid sits in a narrow canyon along the Turquoise Trail, the scenic back road linking Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and it announces itself with a jolt of color after miles of empty piñon-covered hills — tin-roofed miner’s cottages painted violet, teal, and rust-orange, strung along a single street barely wide enough for two trucks to pass. The town mined coal for the Santa Fe Railway for decades until the company shut it down in the 1950s and Madrid emptied out almost overnight, houses left standing for a token dollar to anyone willing to live in a ghost town. Artists eventually took the offer, and Lia and I spent an afternoon seeing exactly what they built out of the wreckage.

A street of galleries and bikers

We parked at one end of Madrid’s short main drag and simply walked its length, in and out of galleries selling raku pottery, hand-forged ironwork, and paintings of the surrounding Ortiz Mountains, the whole street smelling faintly of kiln smoke and green chile from a lunch counter someone had wedged between two studios. The Mine Shaft Tavern, a long wooden saloon with the longest stand-up bar in New Mexico, anchored the middle of town, and on the Sunday we visited its parking lot was solid with motorcycles, riders up from Albuquerque for the same green chile cheeseburgers everyone in town seemed to be eating. A potter working at her wheel in an open garage door told us Madrid’s year-round population barely tops a couple hundred people — meaning most of the street’s residents are also, at some point in the day, its shopkeepers.

Ghosts in the canyon

Above the main street, old coal tipple structures and mine tailings still cling to the hillside, rusted reminders of the boomtown that once shipped coal across the Southwest and even, for a while, strung up an elaborate Christmas light display visible from passing planes. We climbed a short trail behind the old ballpark, where company-league baseball games once drew crowds from across the region, and looked down on the painted rooftops glowing in the late sun, the whole canyon quiet except for wind chimes on someone’s porch. It struck us as one of the odder success stories in the Southwest: a town that survived by becoming almost entirely decorative, and somehow meaning it.

Getting There

Madrid sits on Highway 14, the Turquoise Trail, about 25 miles southeast of Santa Fe and roughly an hour northeast of Albuquerque’s Sunport airport, the nearest major airport in the region. There is no public transit to town, so the drive itself, winding past old mining ruins and desert vistas, is very much part of the experience. Parking is limited to a few small lots along the main street, so an early arrival on weekends saves considerable circling.