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Interesting Facts
- Pilgrims eat your hearts out. Santa Fe is a city of American firsts. It's the oldest colonial city in the U.S. The San Miguel Mission is the nation's oldest church, established in 1610. And the Palace of the Governors is the nation's oldest public building continually in use, built in 1619.
- Nobody captured the spirit of New Mexico better than Georgia O'Keeffe with her paintings of bleached desert skulls, giant flowers of vivid colors and rustic landscapes. O'Keeffe began visiting the state in 1919 and spent almost the last 40 years of her life living here, dying at 98 in Santa Fe.
- Exquisite black-on-black pottery is the trade of the San Ildefonso Pueblo located just north of Santa Fe. Artisans Maria and Julian Martinez launched a renaissance in Native American pottery in the early 1900s when they began producing black designs on polished black pots.
- The nuns of the Loretto Chapel were dismayed when the architect of their church was killed before he could finish his work by building a stairway to the choir. They prayed for help, and a mysterious carpenter showed up and built a spiral staircase without a single nail.
- East meets West at this unusual spa in Santa Fe. Located in the hills above the city Ten Thousand Waves is a traditional Japanese outdoor hot springs resort complete with teak hot tubs, saunas, icy cold plunges and massage therapists.
- Santa Fe blossomed in the mid-1800s as the end of the line for the wagon train route that bore its name, the Santa Fe Trail. From the 1820s through the 1860s, traders fought off Indian attacks, disease and weather to make a 900-mile trip from Missouri to Santa Fe with their goods.
- Santa Fe boasts more art galleries per capita than New York City. The center of the city's arts fare is Canyon Road, a street that became lined with galleries in part because it was the home for five well-known painters at the beginning of the 20th century.
- But where are its steeples. Santa Fe's Saint Francis Cathedral was built large to tame the state's rough Wild West culture, but the twin towers are missing something. Two 160-foot-tall steeples were never added as originally planned.
- The Santa Fe area became the center of America's most secret efforts during World War II, the building of the atomic bomb. Scientists began designing the bomb in secret facilities in nearby Los Alamos in 1943, under the codename of the Manhattan Project.
- The adobe brick and territorial styles of architecture are set in stone in this city. Strict local zoning laws mandate buildings be designed to fit those motifs, and high-rises are banned to ensure good views of the mountains and the night sky.
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