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Two great new getaways

Daniel Gregory, Sunset Online Magazine

In Santa Fe, where the rounded pueblo style of earth-toned stucco architecture dominates, the bright colors of the Zocalo development stand out. A condominium project on the northwest edge of town, it was designed by Ricardo Legorreta, one of Mexico's most famous modern architects.

Design: The development follows a wide piñon pine–studded arroyo and is organized around a series of plazas and courtyards on 46½ acres (in Mexico, a town square is called a zocalo). Strong geometric shapes in brilliant red, orange, and pink stucco were inspired by a piece of red sandstone found on the site.

Henry Shukman, NYTimes

Ever since the 1920's when Santa Fe's Pueblo Revival style, with its adobe walls, viga beams, molded corners and kiva fireplaces, was established and codified, the city has appeared to be one of the best-preserved in the United States. Devotees of its mud architecture, of this southwestern Timbuktu, speak of a native style risen from the earth itself. But the city's look was actually a deliberate concoction, brewed up by the city elders in the 1910s. The railway had bypassed Santa Fe in the 1870's, and the city watched with a tinge of green in its eyes as Taosbecame a magnet for the arts in the early 20th century.

Fred A. Bernstein, NYTimes

THE Plaza, the heart of old Santa Fe, hasn’t changed much since the Spanish settled here 400 years ago. But surrounding the Plaza is an increasingly cosmopolitan city. Sure, it’s possible to focus entirely just on the historic center, where Native American handicrafts are for sale on every corner.

But the rest of Santa Fe now offers groovy contemporary art spaces, hot Asian restaurants and a park by a pair of trailblazing architects. Accept that Santa Fe isn’t just tacos and turquoise anymore, and you’ll find yourself loving the New Mexico capital not for what it was, but what it is.

Santa Fe Recognized As Best Small City In America By Conde Nast Traveler's Readers

PR Newswire

SANTA FE, N.M., July 25, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Santa Fe, New Mexico has been named the Best Small City in America by Conde Nast Traveler's 26th annual Readers' Choice Awards, a ranking of the best cities, islands, cruise lines, airlines, hotels and resorts in the world. Conde Nast Traveler had 79,268 readers participate in the 2013 survey, resulting in 1.3 million votes.

The publication credits the destination's cultural scene as one of its best assets, noting, "no other place in the country so beautifully reflects the art, architecture, food, and crafts of centuries of Native American, Spanish, and Mexican influence." Also included was a recommendation to visit the Museum of International Folk Art (MOIFA) on Museum Hill.

Gary Shteyngart, Travel Leisure

“I raise the strawberry because it wears its heart on its sleeve. Its seeds are on the outside! The strawberry has nothing to hide! It is the perfect size. It is not too big; neither is it too small. Nature has created it so that it would fit perfectly in the mouth.” If you’re wondering where this juicy conversation is happening, let me assure you there is only one possible place in the universe: Santa Fe, New Mexico. I’m at a party in one of the nicer adobe homes I’ve seen so far (thar be mountain views), talking to the rugged and delightfully Swiss-German–accented Sondra Goodwin, photographer and cultivator of fruits and vegetables, nude wrestler extraordinaire, and maker of Denim Duffs, an accessory that mimics the cuffs of denim jeans but is worn as a kind of 1980’s wristband. On Sondra’s own wrist there is a tattoo of a blazing, glorious strawberry approximating the Sacred Heart of Jesus (“I don’t believe in the Christ, but I love the strawberry”) surrounded by six stars. Why six stars? “You know how there are five-star hotels?” Yes. “This is one more.”

Spending Two Perfect Days In Santa Fe

DeMarco Williams, Forbes Travel Guide

You’ve seen blue skies before, but you haven’t seen them quite like this. Santa Fe’s blue looks almost Photoshopped it’s so crisp. Combine that piercing hue with the earth-toned adobe buildings the area is synonymous with, and you have the kind of breathtaking scene a writer would go on and on about in a sonnet. And wouldn’t you know it? Many have. A muse if there ever was one, The City Different, as Santa Fe is lovingly referred, has inspired the words of Willa Cather, the brushstrokes of Georgia O’Keeffe and the design sketches of Tom Ford. After 48 hours in the New Mexico capital city, a similar feeling will resonate in you. You won’t necessarily be sparked to create a work of art all your own, but you’ll certainly have a better understanding as to why others were motivated to do so.

Food & Wine

Santa Fe oscillates between greatness and kitsch. It began with a period of culinary brilliance in 1987, when chef Mark Miller opened the pioneering Coyote Cafe restaurant. Southwestern cuisine had arrived, to national acclaim. But before long, that inspiration began to sink in a pool of green-chile sauce.

The dance between the magnificent and the mundane defines the Santa Fe art scene as well. In the '90s, the city established the region's most important exhibition space, SITE Santa Fe, and the first US biennial for international art. The nascent Santa Fe Biennial incubated curators who rose to steer the mother ship in Italy: the vaunted Venice Biennial. But the energy evaporated, and what was left were coyotes carved in turquoise.

What to Do in Santa Fe

Porochista Khakpour, Departures

A local chef, a classic resort and a thriving art scene are helping to reinvent New Mexico's capital city.

Stay: A former Auberge resort, this collection of 65 casitas reopened in 2012 as the Four Seasons Resort Rancho Encantado Santa Fe. The midcentury feel of the architecture is a welcome departure from the unrelenting Southwesterness of the inns in town, and the interiors—equal parts O’Keeffe and Pendleton—have an appealing rustic modernism. It’s a 15-minute drive from Santa Fe proper, in the greener mountain township of Tesuque; the resort provides a small fleet of Mercedes to ferry guests back and forth. And Terra, the revamped in-house restaurant, is home to the best outdoor fire-pit-side dining in the region—the perfect place for a dinner of seasonal southwestern cuisine and a view of one of New Mexico’s signature psychedelic sunsets.

Seeking Santa Fe

Jean Juliet Buck, Travel and Leisure

Ages old and New Age, rich in art and artsy in attitude, deeply charming and more than a little eccentric, New Mexico’s magnetic colonial city draws all kinds of pilgrims.

In famously beautiful places, character is destiny, scenery is collateral, and big business is kept well down the road.

Santa Fe’s skies are so wide, its adobe so pervasive, its badlands so alien, and its altitude so giddy that visitors don’t know whether they have been beamed up to heaven, pulled into the frontier past, or inducted into a gated community on Mars.

Sensory heaven in Santa Fe

Marnie Hunder, CNN

Earthy, sun-dried structures and startling blue skies provide the vivid backdrop for many an exploration of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The architecture is distinctive, but the natural setting at the base of the southern Rocky Mountains, 7,000 feet above sea level, puts the city in the realm of spectacular. And aesthetics are just a fragment of what draws more than a million visitors a year.

Santa Fe's creativity shines in its art and cuisine, and there's a deep spiritual pull.

"Whatever your religiosity, you are sure to find something to speak to your soul in this old, quiet town in the mountains," writes iReporterDannie Matevia, 26, who visited with her family in February.

ZOCALO SANTA FE