Historic Adobe Houses of Santa Fe, New Mexico

No other American city has built so continuously in earth. Santa Fe was laid out in 1610 by the Spanish governor Pedro de Peralta around a central plaza, and adobe — the local clay, sand, and straw, formed and dried in the high desert sun — has been the dominant building material here for more than four hundred years.

The Plaza itself remains the city’s reference point. The long, low Palace of the Governors anchors its north side; the cathedral closes its east end; the streets that fan outward — San Francisco, Lincoln, Old Santa Fe Trail — were the principal corridors of the colonial town and remain the principal corridors today. Within a five-minute walk south of the Plaza, across the Santa Fe River, lies Barrio de Analco, the small Tlaxcalan and mestizo quarter that survived the 1680 Pueblo Revolt and the long reconquest after it. San Miguel Chapel and the so-called Oldest House face each other here on a single block of East De Vargas Street — the densest concentration of pre-1700 fabric in the United States.

East of the Plaza, Canyon Road climbs gradually along the Acequia Madre toward the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The road began as the trail from the Pueblo of Pecos and was lined through the 1800s with the long, single-room-deep Spanish Colonial houses of farmers irrigating from the ditch; by the 1920s those same houses had been taken over by painters, and Canyon Road became the architectural laboratory of Santa Fe Style. Across the city, north of Paseo de Peralta, an older barrio of working-class adobes still stands along Alto Street.

The look the visitor associates with Santa Fe is in fact a deliberate construction. After the railroad arrived in 1880 the city had begun to look like any other American town — pitched roofs, gable ends, Italianate brick. A small group of architects and museum directors, working from 1909 onward, reversed that trend by reviving battered earthen walls, projecting vigas, and stepped parapets; the city codified the result in its 1957 Historic Styles Ordinance, which still governs new construction in the historic district. The properties in this catalog include both the genuine survivals — the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses — and the early-twentieth-century Pueblo Revival buildings that defined how the rest of the country has imagined Santa Fe ever since.