As upward of a million and a half tourists every year descend 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 urban sprawl as you approach 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 high-rise 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, with its compact, peaceful downtown and walkable streets. 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is changing; the pastel-painted, wooden coyotes that were the obligatory souvenir ten years ago have, for example, been replaced by cast-iron sculptures of Kokopelli, the hunch-backed Ancestral Puebloan flute-player.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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