Taos

Top things to do in Taos

1. 01

   Taos Pueblo - the adobe village that has never been empty

   history culture arts 👍 Popular

   Two multi-storey adobe houses, North House and South House, face each other across the Rio Pueblo de Taos beneath the sacred peak the community draws its water from, and people have lived in them for something like a thousand years. The old village deliberately has no electricity or running water, so what you are walking through is a working community rather than a restoration, which is why it carries a UNESCO World Heritage listing. Visits are self-guided or with a Pueblo guide, photography is regulated, and the village closes to outsiders for feast days and for a long quiet period in late winter and early spring - check before you drive up.

2. 02

   Rio Grande Gorge Bridge - walk out over a 500-ft chasm

   scenic adventure 👍 Popular

   The steel arch carries US-64 across a black basalt slot the river has cut into the mesa, with the deck some 565 ft above the water and a walkway on each side so you can stand over the drop. It looks like nothing at all from the road until the ground simply ends. Sunrise and late afternoon are when the gorge walls colour up, and the parking area on the west rim has short trails along the edge.

3. 03

   San Francisco de Asis Church - the buttressed adobe at Ranchos de Taos

   history culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   The most painted and photographed church in the American Southwest, finished in the early 1800s and famous less for its front than for its rear, where huge mud buttresses swell out of the ground in shapes Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams both fixed on. The parish still re-plasters the whole building by hand each year, so its surface is never quite the same twice. It sits about four miles south of the plaza in the old farming village of Ranchos de Taos.

4. 04

   Taos Ski Valley - steep terrain under Kachina Peak

   snow adventure 👍 Popular

   Ernie Blake cut the first runs into this box canyon in 1955 and the mountain still has the reputation he built: ridge hikes, tight trees and the bumped face of Al's Run dropping straight over the base area, with a lift now serving Kachina Peak above 12,000 ft. The old sign at the bottom telling arrivals not to panic, because they are looking at only a fraction of the mountain, is the honest summary. Snowboarding was allowed in 2008, late, after decades as a skiers-only hill.

5. 05

   Wheeler Peak - climb the highest point in New Mexico

   hiking nature wildlife

   At 13,161 ft it is the state's summit, most often walked from the ski valley up past Williams Lake and then straight up a switchbacking headwall to a bare, wind-scoured ridge with the whole Moreno Valley on the far side. It is a long day at altitude with almost no shade and afternoon storms in high summer, so it is a start-before-dawn hike. Williams Lake alone, in a cirque under the peak, is a much gentler half-day option.

6. 06

   Harwood Museum of Art - the Taos painters and an Agnes Martin room

   culture arts history ⭐ Highly recommended

   The second-oldest museum in the state, sitting in an old adobe compound on Ledoux Street, holds the Taos Society of Artists canvases alongside Hispano santos and contemporary work from the valley. The reason to make time for it is the octagonal gallery built for seven Agnes Martin paintings, lit from above and furnished with nothing but Donald Judd benches - a room designed to be sat in rather than walked through.

7. 07

   Millicent Rogers Museum - Southwestern jewellery, pottery and weaving

   culture arts history

   The Standard Oil heiress moved to Taos in the 1940s, fell for Navajo silver and Pueblo pottery, and left a collection that is now the best single introduction to the region's material culture. The black-on-black pottery of Maria Martinez of San Ildefonso is the centrepiece, and the Hispano religious carving is unusually strong. It stands a few miles north of the plaza off the road to the gorge bridge.

8. 08

   Ledoux Street and the Blumenschein Home - inside the artists' colony

   culture arts history

   Ernest L. Blumenschein, one of the two painters whose broken wagon wheel stranded them here in 1898, lived in this rambling adobe with rooms added over two centuries; it is preserved with the family's furniture, books and paintings still in place. The narrow dirt-coloured lane it stands on is the oldest gallery street in town and takes ten minutes to walk end to end.

9. 09

   Hacienda de los Martinez - a fortified Spanish colonial trading post

   history

   A windowless-outside, courtyard-inside hacienda from 1804, built thick and blank-walled against Comanche and Apache raids, and one of very few Spanish colonial great houses left anywhere in the Southwest. Its owner ran the Taos end of the Camino Real trade to Chihuahua, and the rooms are furnished to show how a frontier trading family actually lived rather than how they would have liked to.

10. 10

    Mabel Dodge Luhan House - the salon that made modern Taos

    history culture arts

    The New York patron arrived in 1917, married a Taos Pueblo man, and spent the next decades pulling D.H. Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather and Carl Jung out to this adobe on the edge of Pueblo land. It works as an inn today, but the public rooms and the famous painted bathroom windows can usually be seen, and it is the single building that best explains why the artists kept coming.

11. 11

    Earthship Biotecture - off-grid houses built from tyres and bottles

    off beaten path culture arts

    On the empty mesa west of the gorge bridge, an architecture experiment that began in the 1970s has grown into a whole community of buildings made from rammed-earth tyres, glass bottles and cans, heated by the sun and running on captured rain. A visitor centre lets you walk through a finished one and see the greenhouse corridor that heats and feeds the house at the same time. It is either the future or a hippie curiosity depending on your mood, and it is very Taos either way.

12. 12

    Taos Box - raft the Rio Grande through the gorge

    adventure nature wildlife

    The Box is the classic run of northern New Mexico, a long day of continuous Class IV water between sheer basalt walls with no easy way out once you are in, and it needs spring snowmelt to be at its best. The Racecourse section further south near Pilar is the shorter, friendlier half-day version that families and first-timers run through the summer. Both go with licensed outfitters rather than on your own.

13. 13

    Black Rock and Manby hot springs - riverside soaks in the gorge

    wellness off beaten path

    Two undeveloped hot springs sit right at the water's edge deep in the gorge, reached by short but genuinely steep trails down from the rim - Black Rock near the John Dunn Bridge at Arroyo Hondo, and Manby, also called Stagecoach, on the old stage road north of town. They are rock pools with no facilities, no supervision and a relaxed attitude to swimwear, and the river can drown them entirely in high spring flow.

14. 14

    Northern New Mexican food - green chile, posole and sopaipillas

    food

    This is a distinct regional cuisine, not Tex-Mex: chile grown up and down the Rio Grande valley, served as a sauce over everything, with blue-corn tortillas, posole and honey-drizzled sopaipillas alongside. Orlando's on the north side is the town institution for chile rellenos and carne adovada, Michael's Kitchen has been doing breakfast and pastries on Paseo del Pueblo Norte since the 1970s, and the Adobe Bar at the old inn on the plaza works as the town's living room in the evening.

Getting to & around Taos

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