The Santa Fe Week

Santa Fe at seven thousand feet asks the visitor to slow down twice, once for the altitude and once for the culture, and the full week, per the doctrine of these pages, is the correct dose, seven days that let the city's layers, four centuries of plaza, market, chapel, and studio, arrive in order, the day trips up the high road and into the mountains breathe properly, and the body adjust to the thin bright air on its own schedule. The weekend visitor collects the plaza. The week visitor gets the city, at the pace it was built for.

The week assembles by register, the first days on foot in the old city, the plaza and palace, the great art museums and the mile of gallery row, the chapels with their legends, taken in the unhurried mornings the altitude recommends, the middle days ranging outward, the high road of the region's itineraries driven slowly to the weaving and pilgrim villages, the tent-rock canyons or the ancient cliff dwellings for the full-day expedition, and the final days repeating whatever took, per the series' whole theory, the market stalls known by name by Friday. The opera or the markets, in their seasons, anchor the calendar the week is built around.

The eating carries its own syllabus, the chile canon of the harvest piece worked through daily, breakfast to late, and the evenings ending at the kiva fires per the first-fires doctrine of the region. The September week, chile roasting and aspen gold together, is the connoisseur's edition.

Book seven nights in one walkable district rather than touring, drink water at altitude like a discipline, and plan the big excursions for mid-week after the body's adjustment. Leave the last day for the second visits the first ones will nominate. The city has absorbed conquerors, railroads, and art markets without hurrying for any of them, per its whole history, and the traveler who gives it the week stops hurrying too, somewhere around the third morning, which is when Santa Fe actually begins.