Taos Half-Day Cultural Tour

Taos is a place where three cultures have lived layered together for centuries: the Puebloan world, the Spanish who followed, and the Anglo artists who came later. This morning reads that story in the places they built. At its heart is Taos Pueblo, a UNESCO World Heritage Site continuously inhabited for over a thousand years and one of the oldest living communities in the country. A Tribal Member guides you through its tiered adobe architecture and the living traditions carried on there today, telling the Pueblo's story in the Pueblo's own words.

From there, the Spanish chapter unveils. At Hacienda de los Martinez, a great fortress of a home with blind outer walls, you step into the trade network that made Taos a crossroads of the Southwest. Then comes San Francisco de Asís. Standing at the heart of Ranchos de Taos since the late 1700s, it is one of the most enduring symbols of faith and community in Northern New Mexico, built from mud, straw, and adobe brick by the hands of the community. It remains an active parish to this day, and one of the most photographed and painted churches in the world. Just across its plaza, Chimayó Trading Del Norte gathers all three cultures under one roof: Navajo weavings, Pueblo pottery, Spanish Colonial carvings, and paintings by the Taos masters.

Between them, the land itself takes over: the volcanic mesas, the bighorn on the rimrock, and the Rio Grande Gorge, where a rare continental rift splits the earth beneath one of the tallest bridges in the country. Taos Pueblo closes each spring for two months, and can close at any time for cultural or ceremonial reasons; when it does, we carry the same three-culture story into another of Taos's cultural treasures.