Santa Fe Without the Mistakes

Santa Fe is four hundred years old, seven thousand feet up, and organized around a calendar of markets, opera, and feast days that fills its small inventory of rooms with a predictability the visitor can either exploit or be flattened by. The standing mistakes here are altitude, arithmetic, and treating the city as a drive-through on the way somewhere else. All three retire easily.

September and October are the connoisseur's months, golden cottonwoods, chile roasting on the air in every parking lot, warm days and sharp nights. Summer brings the opera and the great markets, above all the Indian Market in August, the most important Native art market in the world, which books the entire city a year in advance and should be either targeted deliberately or given a wide, respectful berth. Christmas week, covered elsewhere in these pages, is the winter masterpiece. The value windows are November and the January-through-March weeks between holidays and spring.

The city sits at seven thousand feet and the visitor's first two days will know it. Drink water in embarrassing quantities, go gently on the margaritas the first night, however strong the local argument, and schedule the mountain excursions for the trip's back half. Arriving from sea level, plan nothing strenuous before the third morning. This is the mistake most visitors make in their first hour and pay for across the whole trip.

Sleep within walking distance of the Plaza, in the historic district's adobe inns, and let the car sit, since the old city is compact, the parking is medieval, and the evenings, gallery openings, the Plaza bandstand in summer, the chill coming down off the mountains, belong to walkers. Book market weeks a year out, opera season and October weeks two to three months out, and ask for a kiva fireplace in the cool months, which costs little and improves everything.

Skip the Plaza-facing retail for anything serious, and buy directly, jewelry from the Native artisans under the palace portal, where the program is juried and the provenance is the person across the blanket, and art up Canyon Road, walked slowly, where a hundred galleries sit shoulder to shoulder in old adobes. Skip exactly one museum visit nowhere, since the city's museums are its second glory, but choose two, the folk art museum on the hill above all, rather than exhausting five. Skip dinner without a reservation in season. The city is small and its famous rooms know it.

Fly into Albuquerque and drive the hour up, or into the small city airport when the fares align, and take the high road day trip to Taos, covered elsewhere in these pages, rather than the quick highway. Book in this order for summer: room, opera, dinners. For market weeks, add a year to everything. Order the chile christmas, red and green together, until an allegiance forms, and carry a layer at all times, since the desert reclaims its heat nightly regardless of season.

On the last evening, climb the short hill to the cross above town at sunset, where the whole city lies in its adobe grid below and the Sangre de Cristos go blood-colored on schedule. Four hundred years of visitors have caught their breath up there, in both senses. Respect the altitude, book to the calendar, and the city does the rest.