Santa Fe

We arrived in Santa Fe at seven thousand feet with the light already going long and gold, and I remember thinking the city looked less built than grown — low earthen walls the colour of clay, rounded at every corner, so that the streets curved like riverbeds. There are no glass towers here; an old ordinance keeps everything low and adobe-brown. Lia and I stood in the Plaza as the piñon smoke rose from the first evening fires, and the smell of it — resinous, sweet, unmistakably of this place — is the thing I’ll remember longest. It gets into your coat and stays for days.

The Plaza and the Palace of the Governors

The heart of Santa Fe is its old Plaza, laid out by the Spanish in 1610, and under the long portal of the Palace of the Governors — the oldest continuously occupied public building in the country — Native artisans lay out silver and turquoise on blankets each morning, as they have for generations. We spent a slow hour there, and Lia talked a long while with a Santo Domingo woman about the heishi beads she strings by hand. Around the Plaza the adobe holds galleries and old rooms; we ducked into the Loretto Chapel to see its impossible spiral staircase, built without a central support and, the nuns will tell you, without visible means of holding itself up at all.

Canyon Road and the Weight of Art

Santa Fe has more galleries per capita than almost anywhere, and most of them line Canyon Road, a narrow half-mile of old adobe homes turned over to art. We walked it in the late afternoon when the light does its work, sculpture spilling into every garden, and I lost Lia twice to doorways. This is O’Keeffe country — the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum a few streets over holds the bleached skulls and swelling desert forms she made just north of here — and standing among them I finally understood the northern New Mexico light she chased her whole life. It is harder and clearer than any light I know.

Green Chile and the Question of Red

You cannot leave Santa Fe without confronting the chile, and the state’s official question — “red or green?” — will be put to you at every meal. We ate enchiladas smothered in green at a dim old spot off the Plaza, the heat building slow and then insistent, and I sweated and ordered a second sopaipilla drizzled with honey to put out the fire. The next morning it was huevos rancheros under red, earthier and deeper, and I flip-flopped for the rest of the trip. When you cannot decide, you order “Christmas” — both at once — and I did, unashamed, more than once.

Getting There

Santa Fe has a small airport with limited flights, so most travellers fly into Albuquerque an hour south and drive up — a straightforward run north on I-25 with the mountains rising ahead of you. Better still is the Rail Runner train, which links the two cities cheaply and lets you watch the high desert slide by. The city sits at over two thousand metres, so the air is thin and the sun deceptively strong; drink more water than you think you need and take the first day gently. We stayed four nights within walking distance of the Plaza and never once got in the car, which is exactly how Santa Fe should be done.