The mountainous north is the New Mexico of popular imagination, with its pastel colors, vivid desert landscape and adobe architecture. Even Santa Fe , the one real city is, with well under 100,000 residents, hardly metropolitan in scale, and the narrow streets of its small, historic center, though thronged with tourists, retain the feel of bygone days. Ranging along the headwaters of the Rio Grande 75 miles northeast, the amiable frontier town of Taos - immortalized by Georgia O'Keeffe and D.H.Lawrence - is remarkable chiefly for the stacked dwellings of neighboring Taos Pueblo .

An hour's drive west from Taos or Santa Fe brings you to Bandelier National Monument , where ancient cliff dwellings were carved out of the same forested volcanic plateau that now holds the eerie Los Alamos National Weapons Laboratory . Alternatively, the hills to the east of the Rio Grande hold a succession of characterful Hispanic hamlets, strung along a scenic mountain highway known as the High Road .

Northern New Mexico

• Northern New Mexico

Explore Northern New Mexico

• Bandelier National Monument
• Chama
• From Santa Fe to Albuquerque
• From Santa Fe to Taos: The pueblos
• High Road
• Los Alamos
• Santa Fe
• Taos

New Mexico cities


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