Summer Travel: Small Town // Big City

{ No.8-Big City: Santa Fe } Noah Caldwell

If you can tear yourself away from Taos, head down Route 68 to its kindred cousin of a city, Santa Fe. Though not a “mountain town” in Colorado parlance, Santa Fe is still cradled by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the same range that hosts Taos up north. (Santa Fe is a few hundred feet higher than Taos, so you decide which is more rugged.)I

Santa Fe was the colonial capital of the Mexican territory of Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico from 1610 until 1848, a considerably longer timespan than the 150 years that it’s been part of the United States. When the land changed hands, the designation stuck, making it the longest-running capital in the “U.S.” (and one of the smallest in the union—there are just over 70,000 “Santa Feans”).

Santa Fe’s small size belies its considerable reputation for cultivating artists of all kinds. Near the turn of the 20th century, Santa Fe was reconfigured by town planners enthralled by the City Beautiful movement, which advocated that architectural and monumental beauty could inspire civic virtue in urban populations. Growth expectations were tempered when the regional railroad bypassed the city, but the ideal of beautification had taken hold, enough to be dubbed a UNESCO Creative City for “Design, Crafts and Folk Art” (not quite a World Heritage Site, but commendable nonetheless).