New Mexico

New Mexico

Santa Fe, New Mexico, has been a capital city since 1610. That's a full decade before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.

It's the oldest state capital in the United States, and the Palace of the Governors on the central plaza has been in continuous use since the day it was built. Four different governments have ruled from that one adobe building: Spain, the Pueblo people, Mexico, and the United States.

Pueblo, Navajo, Apache, and other Native peoples lived here for thousands of years before the Spanish arrived. Ancestral Puebloans built stone and adobe villages along the Rio Grande as early as 1050.

Spanish colonists came in 1598 and spent decades trying to force Pueblo people to convert to Christianity and work for them. Disease and violence dropped the Pueblo population from roughly 80,000 to about 17,000.

In 1680, a leader named Po'Pay united Pueblo communities across hundreds of miles and drove every Spanish colonist out of New Mexico. It was the most successful Native uprising against European colonizers in North American history. The Spanish didn't return for 12 years.

After Mexican independence from Spain in 1821, the Santa Fe Trail opened and American traders flooded in. The U.S. took New Mexico from Mexico after the Mexican-American War in 1848.

Statehood didn't come until 1912, making it one of the last states admitted in the lower 48.

During World War II, the government built a secret city at Los Alamos to develop the atomic bomb. Scientists and their families shared a single mailing address: PO Box 1663, Santa Fe.

On July 16, 1945, they tested the world's first nuclear weapon at the Trinity Site, 200 miles to the south.

Walk through the Palace of the Governors on Santa Fe's Plaza, where Native American artisans sell handmade jewelry under the portal every day. Explore the ancient cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument, or visit Taos Pueblo, one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in North America.

At White Sands National Park, 275 square miles of white gypsum dunes stretch to the horizon.