Introduction
Since the early 1980s, SANTA FE has been the chic-est
destination in the US, consistently voted the country's most
popular city by upmarket travelers. That appeal rests on a very
solid basis: it's one of America's oldest and most beautiful
cities, founded by Spanish missionaries as their northernmost
colonial capital in 1609, a full ten years 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 new architects' museums and
galleries attract art-lovers from all over the world.
With upward of a million and a half tourists every year
descending upon a town of just sixty thousand inhabitants, Santa
Fe has inevitably grown somewhat overblown; long-term residents
bemoan what's been lost, while first-time visitors are inclined to
wonder what all the fuss is about. The depressing urban sprawl as
you approach town from the interstate makes for a lousy
introduction, while the rigorous insistence that every downtown
building should look like a seventeenth-century Spanish colonial
palace takes a bit of getting used to. This is the only city in
the world where what at first glance appears to be a perfectly
preserved ancient adobe turns out to be a highrise parking lot,
and it would be illegal to build a gas station that didn't
resemble an Indian prayer chamber. There's still a lot to like about Santa Fe, however. Though
Santa Fe style may have become something of a cliché, that cliché
is changing; the pastel-painted, wooden coyotes that were the
obligatory souvenir ten years ago have for example been replaced
by cast-iron sculptures of Kokopelli, the hunch-backed
Anasazi flute-player. In a town where the Yellow Pages list
over 250 art galleries, you'll get plenty of opportunities to buy
one. |
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