“This city, high in the mountains with often unforgiving weather, attracts 2.2 million overnight visitors annually.”
SANTA FE, New Mexico — This capital city of 89,646, at 7,199 feet (2,194 meters) altitude at the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, is a tourist destination, attracting 2.2 million to three million overnight visitors annually.
The city, which has traditional pueblo construction with limestone blocks or large adobe bricks form the walls of each room here, has an unforgiving temperature of 8 degrees Celsius on the average during autumn and could go down when thunderstorms drench the capital.
This capital city has been considered a vibrant cultural city due to its history of Spanish colonization, strong Native American influences, a thriving arts scene with galleries and museums, unique adobe architecture, and a diverse population of artists and creative individuals.
We arrived here more than a month after the peak season of tourist arrivals — July and August — with the most popular months for visitors from April to October towards the end of autumn.
Officials intended to preserve the qualities of old Santa Fe to attract tourism along with population growth.
Santa Fe Style includes three distinct architectural types: Pueblo-Spanish Revival; Territorial Revival; and Santa Fe vernacular.
This old capital was founded in 1610 by Governor Don Pedro de Peralta, 39 years after Manila was founded in 1571 by Spanish conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legazpi.
Santa Fe is the site of the oldest public building in America, the Palace of the Governors and the nation’s oldest community celebration, the Santa Fe Fiesta, established in 1712 to mark the reconquest of New Mexico in the summer of 1692.
Our tour guides told us — and we soon discovered — that Santa Fe is one of America’s “most historic, artistic, and fascinating cities and has been described as “The City Different” decked in cultural fusion with “echoes of the past alive in the present.”
The architectural influences in this capital city can be immediately seen but what sets homes apart is the adobe style — with traditional adobe created from whatever people have handy like straw, clay and mud.
This distinctive city of the American Southwest has Pueblo style architecture most prevalent in New Mexico, which is often blended with Territorial Revival architecture.
We were fortunate to have gone to the steps of the city’s San Miguel Mission, built around 1610, considered the oldest church in the continental United States.
This was built by and for Tlaxcalan Indians who arrived from Mexico south of here who accompanied Spanish colonists to Santa Fe.
The simple adobe chapel was designed for the community of soldiers, farmers, and craftspeople who settled south of the Santa Fe River.
The Mission, now a National Historic Landmark, features a 780-pound San Jose Bell from the American Civil War, high vega beams, and devotional artwork.
The chapel’s apse has an elevated roof section with a clerestory window that bathes the altar in sunset light.
Near the Mission is the Loretto Chapel, close to the city’s top sights at Old Santa Fe Trail and known for its unique, helix-shaped staircase, its highlight and a destination for local and foreign tourists.
The 20-foot tall staircase, built between 1877 and 1881 — completed without a staircase in 1878, according to official sources — is circular, with two 360-degree turns and no visible support, made of wood and held together by wooden pegs, without glue or nails.
The Lorretines claimed St. Joseph built the staircase, but evidence suggests it was built by French carpenter Francois-Jean Rochas.
Some architects and carpenters cannot explain how it is so durable, that many say it is rather strange that a staircase intended for nuns in robes would not have a handrail.
Between the Mission and the Loretto chapel is the so-called “The Oldest House” on De Vargas Street, where a bronze historical marker calls it the “OLDEST” House.
Near the three tourist attractions is the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, magnificent in French Romanesque style, a deep contrast to Santa Fe’s surrounding adobe buildings.
The church, at the Cathedral Plaza, was built between 1869 and 1886 in hopes of bringing Catholicism to the Southwest.
At the Basilica after the 11.15 am Sunday Mass, we were able to have a few lines with the cathedral’s rector, Very Rev. John Cannon, who prayed over Rose, who recently lost her older sister Carmen, to help her deal with her loss and for the eternal rest of her 78-year-old sister.
The priest’s blessing for the strangers — from the Philippines — was a touching page of a memory in this city not far from the Rio Grande, the 2,019-km border of the United States and Mexico.
