Santa Fe, New Mexico - an ancient city

SANTA FE
You Can’t Escape
The Past In This
Ancient City

By RAY CHATELIN

Photos By Toshi

You can’t escape the past in Santa Fe. It clings to you at every corner, stares at you from every doorway and window, and speaks to you from the ancient cliff dwellings in the nearby hills.

The city not only capitalizes on its culture and history, it revels in it. The old and the new live side by side, a physical and spiritual combination of an aboriginal culture, an imported European past and chic 21st Century Americana.

It’s a city of narrow, winding streets, quiet serenity, tan adobe walls, and hundred year old shade trees. It nurtures and guards its 18th century look, preferring historic Spanish designs to contemporary architecture. And, the central core is laid out to accommodate the needs of the 17th Century, not the 21st.

No Disney-style theme-park, this. It’s all real. Everywhere is the impact that the varied cultures - the Hopi, the Navajo, the Spanish, even the ancient Peoples called the Anasazi - have imprinted on the region. It's a cultural potpourri that can be seen, worn and touched. Paintings, pottery, and jewelry are the most obvious items, and they're nicely fashioned by some of the region’s most celebrated artists and designers.

It’s easy to be side-tracked in Santa Fe with its 225 restaurants, 250 art galleries, 70 jewelry shops, 13 museums, and a world class opera that draws lovers of high-C’s from around the world.

Fridays are gallery hopping nights, a Santa Fe tradition in which galleries open new shows complete with artists’ receptions. Join the crowd, meet the artists. Friday newspapers have complete listings.

But restaurants and art galleries are not really what draw people to this community that also happens to be the smallest state capital in the USA. The fact is that nowhere else on the continent can you find so distinctive a mix - a place in the 21st Century so deeply a part of the past.

The city’s 65,000 residents resolutely exploit its Mexican, Spanish and Indian traditions, mostly in good taste though you’ll come across the occasional tacky gallery. Enter the central core of Santa Fe and it’s like being in a time warp where building codes demand that houses and business structures within the city be built in old adobe style.

There are two Santa Fe’s, each very different to the other, but both owing its existence to an ancient past. One is oh-so-with-it, bejeweled in wealth, private clubs, old money, and expensive for tourists. The other is accommodating to the needs of contemporary North America, where you can revel in Big Macs and Tacos and relatively inexpensive motels on the outskirts of the city.

The city core seems a collection of small, bright things and where a variety of colors compete for the attention of your eyes – red windows against a beige, sandy stucco background; a row of brightly colored mailboxes along Canyon Road where you’ll find countless art galleries; windows showing sparkling silver jewelry set with turquoise.

The city is breathless in more ways than just its physical beauty. At some 7,000 ft. (2134 m), and with a dry, arid climate, it takes a while for some to become acclimatized. Pace yourself. It gets very hot in the summer (85-95 F; 30-35 C) and the humidity is only about 20 per cent. In Dec/Jan it can reach a frigid 5F/-7C. To get the most from the city, take one of the many walking tours available through any hotel. Then follow it up on your own, later.

Once you start walking the streets of the central town there’s a sense of overwhelming culture, of ghosts of the past lurking behind every corner. Santa Fe dates from 1610, when Spanish explorers led by conquistador Don Pedro de Peralta, pushed up from Mexico along the Santa Fe Trail that began at Mexico City. Today’s street names (Paseo de Peralta, Guadalupe, Otero, De Vargas) – attest to its Spanish and Mexican past. Santa Fe, for those curious about such things, means “Holy Faith” in Spanish.

At the heart of the old town is the scenic plaza, site of cultural events throughout the year including the Indian Market during the third week in August, the largest juried Indian arts and crafts show in the world.

In 1680, Spanish and Natives clashed for control of the city and territory on that spot. The Spanish, having only about 150 soldiers to hold the area, lost it to the Pueblo Indians, but recaptured it in the summer of 1692.

You can get a taste of what life must have been like then by a visit to San Miguel Chapel (401 Old Santa Fe Trail at De Vargas) the city’s oldest church, built in the 1600s by the Tlaxcala Indians who came from Mexico as servants of the Spanish conquistadors. In it is the San Jose Bell, built in Spain in 1356 and transported from Mexico City along the Santa Fe Trail. Next door is a terrific gift shop in what is thought to be the oldest house in America.

On the edge of the plaza is the Palace of The Governors, first built in 1610. It housed the first Spanish governor. It’s now the museum of history for New Mexico and should be the first place to head to for a background on what makes the city tick. Across the street is the Museum of Fine Arts with its collection of 8,000 art pieces including those of Georgia O’Keeffe and other well known New Mexican artists. There’s a Georgia O’Keeffe museum as well on Johnson Street about two blocks northwest of the Plaza.

And while you’re on the museum run, don’t forget to include the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture next to the Museum of international Folk Art. There, you’ll get a wonderful outline of the Pueblo, Apache and Navajo Indian culture and the impact they’ve had on modern-day New Mexico.

Eventually, every visitor has to come to grips with Canyon Road, the winding, uphill street that houses the tacky, the beautiful and the always fascinating shops and small galleries of Santa Fe where you can find everything Southwestern you ever thought you wanted. Buy a painting, purchase a saddle or a piece of jewelry – or just sit on a porch sipping a beer or cola watching the tourists and locals.

Santa Fe loves its festivals – visual arts, dance, music, theatre. Chamber music and opera lovers come here every summer to experience a combination of sunshine activities, Beethoven and Verdi, incidentally taking advantage of three fine golf courses. The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and the Santa Fe Opera festival are major international events.

No trip to Santa Fe is complete without an exploration of the ancient Peoples that started the whole thing centuries ago. Throughout New Mexico, into southern Colorado and then to Arizona are remnants of the Anasazi civilization. Their ruins are a natural extension of the history you find in the city.

The Anasazi (meaning, “the ancient ones”) lived in the region from the 9th through the 13th Centuries. What their real tribal names were is anyone's guess. No one really seems to know who they were. Their remaining small, crumbled walled towns still evoke a quiet excitement and wonder. They left the area in the 12th and early 13th Centuries - probably due to drought and disease.

At Bandelier National Monument - an hour's drive from Santa Fe - you climb through the same cave rooms that housed these ancient peoples, through homes and ceremonial buildings that were their social focal points.

When you stand at the centre of the kiva, the heart of the old community, and glance upwards into the cliff sides, it dwarfs the imagination. And when the hot breeze blows gently through the valley, it's a haunting place - at once defining a people and making your own existence seem less…well, important.