SANTA FE, NM - OCTOBER 20, 2013: An adobe structure on Santa Fe, New Mexico's historic Plaza is home to the New Mexico Museum of Art. (Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images)

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The Plaza

Top choice in Santa Fe


For more than 400 years, the Plaza has stood at the heart of Santa Fe. Originally it marked the far northern end of the Camino Real from Mexico; later, it was the goal for wagons heading west along the Santa Fe Trail. Today, this grassy square is peopled by tourists wandering from museum to margarita, food vendors, skateboarding kids and street musicians. Beneath the portico of the Palace of the Governors, along its northern side, Native Americans sell jewelry and pottery.


Lonely Planet's must-see attractions

Nearby Santa Fe attractions

2. New Mexico Museum of Art

0.05 MILES

Built in 1917 and a prime early example of Santa Fe’s Pueblo Revival architecture, the New Mexico Museum of Art has spent a century collecting and…

3. Museum of Contemporary Native Arts

0.1 MILES

Primarily showing work by the students and faculty of the esteemed Institute of American Indian Arts, this museum also has the finest contemporary…

4. St Francis Cathedral

0.11 MILES

Santa Fe’s French-born bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy – hero of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop – set about building this cathedral in 1869. Its…

5. Loretto Chapel

0.13 MILES

Built in 1878 for the Sisters of Loretto, this tiny Gothic chapel is famous as the site of St Joseph's Miraculous Staircase, a spiraling and apparently…

6. Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

0.18 MILES

With 10 beautifully lit galleries in a rambling 20th-century adobe, this museum boasts the world's largest collection of O'Keeffe’s work. She’s best known…

7. Casa Vieja

0.26 MILES

Billing itself as the oldest house in the United States, this two-room adobe building is said to date – in a much altered form – from c 1646. While…

8. San Miguel Mission

0.27 MILES

Erected from 1610 onwards, by and for the Tlaxcalan Indians who arrived from Mexico with Santa Fe’s first Spanish colonists, this is considered to be the…

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