The first Spaniards to explore what's now New Mexico were greeted with hospitality by a settled population of around a hundred thousand people, living in perhaps a hundred villages and towns. However, the people the Spaniards named the Pueblo Indians (pueblo is Spanish for "village") soon grew to resent the imposition of Catholicism and the virtual enslavement of Pueblo laborers. In the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the various tribes banded together and ousted the entire colonial regime, killing scores of priests and soldiers and sending hundreds more south to Mexico. After the Spanish returned in 1693, the Pueblos showed little further resistance, and they have co-existed surprisingly amicably ever since, accepting aspects of Catholicism – most pueblos have a large adobe church at their core – without giving up their traditional beliefs and practices.

New Mexico is now home to around forty thousand Pueblo Indians, with each of its nineteen autonomous pueblos having its own laws and system of government. All have been modernized to some extent, and the recent explosion of Native American gaming has seen many open their own casinos, at sites usually located along the major highways well away from the residential areas. However, all also proudly retain the "Old Ways". Saints' days, major Catholic holidays such as Easter and the Epiphany, and even the Fourth of July, are celebrated with a combination of Native American traditions and Catholic rituals, featuring elaborately costumed dances and massive communal feasts.

Most pueblos are not the tourist attractions they're often touted to be. The best known, Taos and Ácoma, retain their ancient defensive architecture, but the rest tend to be dusty adobe hamlets scattered around a windblown plaza. Unless you arrive on a feast day, or are a knowledgeable shopper in search of Pueblo crafts (most have their own specialties), visits are liable to prove disappointing. In addition, you'll certainly be made to feel unwelcome if you fail to behave respectfully – don't go "exploring" places that are off limits to outsiders, such as shrines, kivas or private homes.

Fifteen of the pueblos are concentrated along the Rio Grande north of Albuquerque, with a long-standing division between the seven southern pueblos, south of Santa Fe, most of which speak Keresan, and the group to north, which mostly speak Tewa (pronounced tay-wah) and jointly promote themselves as the Eight Northern Indian Pueblos (505/852-4265 or 1-800/793-4955). Visitors to each are required to register at a visitor center; some charge an admission fee of around $3, and all charge additional fees of $5 for still photography, $10–15 for video cameras and up to $100 for sketching. There's no extra charge for feast days or dances, but photography is often forbidden on special occasions.

For details of guided tours, contact Nambe Pueblo Tours (505/820-1340 or 1-800/946-2623).

On a slightly raised plateau two miles southeast of the town center, with extensive views of the hills and mountains that almost entirely surround the city, stands Santa Fe's other concentration of museums, reachable by Santa Fe Trails bus #10. The delightful Museum of International Folk Art, part of the New Mexico State Museum, focuses on a huge collection of clay figurines and models from around the world, arranged in colorful dioramas that include a Pueblo Feast Day with dancing kachinas and camera-clicking tourists. The Hispanic Heritage Wing is an engaging reminder of just how close New Mexico's ties have always been with Mexico itself, while the museum's giftshop sells some unusual ethnic souvenirs. Under the title From This Earth, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, across the parking lot, also part of the New Mexico State Museum, holds a superb array of Native American pottery, ranging from Anasazi and ancient Pueblo pieces right up to the works of twentieth-century revivalists, and uses touch-screen CD-ROM technology to illuminate and explain the traditions and processes involved.

The main focus of the plaza, and the principal model for Santa Fe's revived architectural unity, is the Palace of the Governors, which fills its entire northern side. Part of the Museum of New Mexico, this low-slung and initially unprepossessing structure is actually the oldest public building in the US. Originally sod-roofed, it was constructed in 1610 as the headquarters of Spanish colonial administration; the name may now seem misleadingly grand, but the building was once much larger. The well-preserved interior, organized around an open-air courtyard, holds excellent displays on New Mexico's history, plus photos that show that until 1913 the palace itself looked like a typical, formal, territorial building, with a square tower at each corner. Its subsequent adobe "reconstruction" was based on pure conjecture. The arcaded adobe veranda along its front, offering protection from both sun and wind, serves as a market for local Native American crafts-sellers.

Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

Just west of the palace, the Museum of Fine Arts is housed in a particularly attractive adobe, with ornamental beams and a cool central courtyard. It's also one of the few major art museums to be established by artists, as opposed to educators or collectors, and focuses on changing exhibits of contemporary painting and sculpture by mostly local artists. The showpiece new Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, a block northwest at 217 Johnson St, opened in 1997, with ten galleries housing the largest collection of O'Keeffe's work in the world. Pieces range in date from 1914 – thus pre-dating her exposure to New Mexico, though a 1915 rendition of Palo Duro Canyon in Texas hints at the abstractions to come – up to 1982. Among the sun-bleached skulls and iconic flowers sold in print galleries throughout the Southwest, some less familiar New York cityscapes make a surprising contrast. Most of the desert landscapes were painted near Abiquiu, forty miles northwest of Santa Fe, where O'Keeffe lived from 1946 until her death in 1986.

Across the tiny Santa Fe River to the southwest, three blocks along Guadalupe Street, you'll find a less celebrated but equally attractive little district, centered around the small but beautiful Santuario de Guadalupe (May–Oct Mon–Sat 9am–4pm; Nov–April Mon–Fri 9am–4pm; donation). Complete with a fine Baroque reredos (altarpiece), the shrine was built at the end of the eighteenth century to mark the end of the Camino Real highway from Mexico City. Old warehouses and small factory premises nearby, such as the Sanbusco Centre on Montezuma Avenue, have been converted to house boutiques, art galleries and restaurants.

Follow the river upstream, or walk two blocks east from the plaza, and you approach a building, strangely out of place among Santa Fe's earthy adobes, looming at the top of San Francisco Street. St Francis Cathedral, the first church west of the Mississippi to be designated a cathedral, was built in 1869 by Archbishop Lamy. French-educated Lamy, the title figure in Willa Cather's novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, commissioned the building in the formal – and, frankly, dreary – Romanesque style popular in France. The nearby Loretto Chapel, a block away at the start of Old Santa Fe Trail, is known for its so-called "Miraculous Staircase", an elegant spiral built without nails or obvious means of support. During construction, the church's designer is said to have been killed by Lamy's cousin, so that for years there was no way up to the choir loft. According to legend, an unknown carpenter arrived in answer to the nuns' prayers, built the stairs and then disappeared.

Two blocks south, across the river along the Old Santa Fe Trail, is the ancient San Miguel Mission (Mon–Sat 10am–4pm, Sun 2–4.30pm). Only a few of the massive adobe internal walls survive from the original 1610 building, most of which was destroyed in the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. The chapel is the heart of the old Barrio de Analco workers' district, whose many two-hundred-year-old houses now form one of Santa Fe's most appealing residential neighborhoods.

Not far away to the east, gallery-lined Canyon Road – which stakes a claim to being the oldest street in the US, dating from Pueblo days – climbs a steady but shallow incline along the river bed and is lined by dozens of fine adobes.