42 Fun Facts About Santa Fe

What does 'Santa Fe' mean in English?

Holy Faith: Governor Pedro de Peralta named his new capital La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís, the Royal Town of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi, and everyday speech kept just two of its words.

Santa Fe holds which distinction among US state capitals?

Highest altitude: at roughly 7,000 feet above sea level, Santa Fe sits about a third of a mile higher than Denver, the capital that calls itself the Mile High City.

Which famous highway ran through Santa Fe until a 1937 realignment bypassed the city?

Route 66: its first route looped north through Santa Fe until Governor Arthur Hannett, voted out in 1926 and blaming the capital's politicians, is said to have rushed through a cutoff that left the city off the road.

Which mountain range rises behind Santa Fe?

Sangre de Cristo Mountains: this southern arm of the Rockies rises so close to the city that a ski area on its slopes lies just 16 miles from the Plaza.

Which Santa Fe adobe church is often called the oldest church in the continental United States?

San Miguel Chapel: its bell seems to carry the date 1356 and was long claimed as one of the oldest in the country, until a historian found an old man who remembered it being cast in 1856.

Who led the first Spanish colonization of New Mexico in 1598?

Juan de Oñate: he planted the colony in 1598 but governed it so harshly that Spain later put him on trial, found him guilty of cruelty and banished him from New Mexico.

Which 1680 uprising drove the Spanish out of Santa Fe for twelve years?

Pueblo Revolt: after decades in which missionaries burned their masks and sacred objects, most of the Pueblo peoples rose together under Popé in August 1680 and kept the Spanish out of New Mexico until 1692.

Who retook Santa Fe for Spain in 1692 in the so-called 'Bloodless Reconquest'?

Diego de Vargas re-entered Santa Fe in September 1692 without a battle, though hard fighting followed in 1693; the Fiestas de Santa Fe, held each September, commemorate his entrada.

Beginning in the 1820s, the Santa Fe Trail linked the city to which US frontier state?

Missouri: earlier American traders who neared Santa Fe had been arrested by Spanish soldiers, but when William Becknell set out from Franklin in 1821, newly independent Mexico welcomed his goods and the trade took off.

Which novel did a governor of New Mexico Territory finish in Santa Fe's Palace of the Governors?

Ben-Hur: Lew Wallace finished it there in 1880, writing at night after his official duties, which included a deal for Billy the Kid's testimony that collapsed when the district attorney refused to free the outlaw.

Which US general marched into Santa Fe in 1846 to claim New Mexico?

Stephen W. Kearny: the Mexican force waiting on the road withdrew, and his troops marched into Santa Fe unopposed in August 1846, taking New Mexico without a shot.

Which Confederate general's forces occupied Santa Fe in March 1862?

Henry Hopkins Sibley's Texan brigade occupied Santa Fe in March 1862, but after Union troops burned his supply train at Glorieta Pass on March 28 he retreated down the Rio Grande to Texas.

Which French-born bishop built Santa Fe's St. Francis Cathedral?

Jean Baptiste Lamy, who reached Santa Fe in 1851 and became its first archbishop in 1875, began the cathedral in 1869; Willa Cather based 'Death Comes for the Archbishop' on him.

In what style was St. Francis Cathedral built, in contrast to the adobe around it?

Romanesque Revival: French architects raised it around the old adobe church, which was then torn down and carried out through the new front door, and the planned spires were never built for lack of funds.

The Loretto Chapel is famous for which feature?

A spiral staircase: in the Sisters' telling, a stranger turned up after their nine days of prayer to St. Joseph, built two full turns of stairs with no central support or nails, and left without collecting his pay.

The Loretto Chapel's design was modeled on which Paris landmark?

Projectus Mouly modeled the Gothic Revival chapel on Sainte-Chapelle in Paris; its French stained glass traveled by ship to New Orleans and then by wagon over the Santa Fe Trail.

New Mexico's State Capitol in Santa Fe is nicknamed what?

Nicknamed the Roundhouse, New Mexico's capitol is the only round state capitol in the United States; from above its plan echoes the Zia sun symbol on the state flag.

Santa Fe's historic-district ordinance requires new buildings to follow which styles?

Spanish Territorial or Pueblo: the rule is why even new buildings downtown have flat roofs and earth-toned stucco walls, often laid over concrete block or lumber instead of real adobe.

What are the exposed roof beams that poke through adobe walls called?

Vigas: the word is simply Spanish for beams, and on many newer Santa Fe buildings the log ends poking through the wall hold nothing up, added only to give the old adobe look.

Which giant effigy, 'Old Man Gloom', is burned each year before the Fiestas de Santa Fe?

Zozobra: his creator and a newspaper editor chose the name, a Spanish word for anxiety, and each year people's written 'glooms' are stuffed inside the giant puppet so their troubles burn with him.

Which artist created the first Old Man Gloom effigy in his backyard in 1924?

Will Shuster: the painter is said to have borrowed the idea from a Mexican Easter custom of burning an effigy of Judas, and in 1964 he signed his creation over to the Kiwanis Club, which has staged it since.

Roughly how tall is the Old Man Gloom effigy?

50 feet: the 2007 Old Man Gloom, a few inches short of that, was certified by Guinness as the world's largest marionette, though a taller puppet built in Canada took the record a year later.

In Santa Fe restaurants, what does ordering your chile 'Christmas' get you?

Both red and green chile: servers ask 'Red or green?' with every order, a habit the state legislature turned into New Mexico's official state question, and 'Christmas' is the diner's way of asking for the two sauces together.

How was the Santa Fe Opera's site chosen?

Firing guns: the founder and an acoustician crossed a former guest ranch setting off shots until they found the natural bowl where sound carried best.

Who founded the Santa Fe Opera in 1956?

John Crosby: a New York conductor, he launched the company with his parents' money, then ran it himself for more than four decades before stepping down in 2000.

What is the name of Meow Wolf's flagship Santa Fe installation?

House of Eternal Return: visitors walk into a two-story Victorian house whose fictional family has vanished, then crawl through its fireplace and other hidden portals into caves and parallel worlds.

Which fantasy author originally backed the Meow Wolf art collective?

George R. R. Martin bought the defunct Silva Lanes bowling alley and leased it to the collective for its first permanent home in Santa Fe.

Which painter's own museum is in Santa Fe?

Georgia O'Keeffe: she began spending summers in New Mexico in 1929 and moved there for good in 1949, and the museum, opened in 1997, also takes visitors to her home and studio in Abiquiú.

In 2005 Santa Fe became a member of which UNESCO program?

Creative Cities Network: UNESCO lists Santa Fe under crafts and folk art, noting that one job in ten there is tied to arts and culture and that more than 250 galleries do business in the city.

Which Museum Hill museum was founded in 1953 by Florence Dibell Bartlett?

Museum of International Folk Art: Bartlett believed folk art could bring 'a closer understanding between men', and her founding gift from 34 countries has since grown to well over 100,000 objects.

Santa Fe's street with the densest concentration of art galleries is called what?

Canyon Road: its old adobe family compounds drew painters such as Los Cinco Pintores in the 1920s, and their studios grew into a half-mile strip of about a hundred galleries.

Which Santa Fe art market fills the Plaza each August?

Indian Market: it started in 1922 as a small indoor exhibition staged alongside the Fiesta, and its organizers now call it the largest juried Native art show in the world, with about 1,000 artists selling.

What do Santa Feans call the candlelit paper-bag lanterns that much of New Mexico calls luminarias?

Farolitos: the word means little lanterns, and Santa Fe saves 'luminarias' for the small piñon bonfires lit beside them on Christmas Eve, the older of the two customs.

Since 1943, Santa Fe has served as the gateway to which national laboratory?

Los Alamos: recruits to the secret lab were told only to report to 109 East Palace Avenue in Santa Fe, where Dorothy McKibbin handed out the passes that got them past the guards.

The Santa Fe Institute, founded in 1984, studies what?

Complex systems: the mix of fields was broad enough to make room for a novelist, Cormac McCarthy, who preferred scientists' company to writers' and spent two decades there editing researchers' papers.

Which Nobel-winning physicist co-founded the Santa Fe Institute?

Murray Gell-Mann: the Nobel laureate who borrowed the word 'quark' from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake helped set up the institute in 1984 and lived in Santa Fe until his death in 2019.

How is Santa Fe's climate classified under the Köppen system?

Cold semi-arid: the city is dry but gets too much rain and snow to count as desert, and its wettest months are July and August, when the summer monsoon carries thunderstorms north from Mexico.

Which commuter train service connects Santa Fe to Albuquerque?

Rail Runner Express: the name plays on the roadrunner, New Mexico's state bird, and the joke runs to the doors, which close with the cartoon Road Runner's 'beep-beep'.

What is Santa Fe's best-known nickname?

The City Different: by statehood in 1912 its streets looked much like any other American town's, so the city set out to rebuild in one adobe style for the tourist trade and made being unlike everywhere else its pitch.

For more than two centuries, which road was Santa Fe's lifeline south to Mexico City?

El Camino Real: the 'royal road' was the province's one link to the outside world until 1821, when American goods began rolling in over the Santa Fe Trail and trade swung east.

Which liberal arts school known for its Great Books program has a Santa Fe campus?

St. John's College: it skips textbooks and lectures for discussion of the original works, and because Santa Fe and Annapolis follow one reading list, students can swap campuses for a year.

Santa Fe archaeologist Edgar Lee Hewett helped bring about which 1906 law?

The Antiquities Act: Hewett toured the Southwest's ruins with Congressman John Lacey in 1902, and his survey of the sites helped carry the law that lets presidents protect such places as national monuments.