The Plaza at the center of Santa Fe has watched flags change with remarkable regularity. The Spanish laid it out in 1610 according to King Philip II's Laws of the Indies, with the Palace of the Governors anchoring its north side. In 1680, Pueblo peoples drove the Spanish out entirely, governing from that same Palace for twelve years until Diego de Vargas reclaimed the city in 1692. Mexico's flag flew after independence in 1821, drawing traders along the Santa Fe Trail from Missouri. Then in 1846, General Stephen Kearny marched 1,700 soldiers into the plaza to claim it for the United States. For a few days in March 1862, even the Confederate flag flew here, before Union forces pushed General Sibley out after the Battle of Glorieta Pass. Through it all, Santa Fe endured -- not as a relic, but as a working capital.

Santa Fe looks like no other American city, and that is by design -- literally. After the railroad bypassed the city in the 1880s, sending it into economic decline, civic leaders turned architectural unity into a survival strategy. They mandated the Pueblo Revival style: earth-toned stucco walls, flat roofs, vigas (exposed wooden beams), and canales (rain spouts). A 1957 ordinance made it official for all new construction in historic districts. The result is a city that appears to have grown organically from the desert floor, its buildings echoing the same palette of terracotta, sand, and ochre found in the surrounding landscape. Some locals call the stucco imposters 'faux-dobe,' but the overall effect is undeniable -- Santa Fe's streetscape is one of the most distinctive in North America.

One-tenth of all employment in Santa Fe is connected to arts and culture, and writers and authors make up a higher proportion of the workforce than in any other American city. Canyon Road alone holds dozens of galleries in what was once a Pueblo trading path. Georgia O'Keeffe painted its landscapes. D.H. Lawrence, Cormac McCarthy, and George R.R. Martin all called it home. The Santa Fe Opera performs in an open-air theater carved into a hillside north of town, and Meow Wolf's House of Eternal Return -- backed by Martin -- turned a former bowling alley into an immersive art experience. In 2005, UNESCO inducted Santa Fe as the first American city in its Creative Cities Network, recognizing its concentration of folk art, craft, and indigenous artistic traditions.

Santa Fe's artistic reputation overshadows a parallel identity as a science hub. During World War II, the city served as the gateway to Los Alamos National Laboratory, just a 45-minute drive into the Jemez Mountains. The Manhattan Project's scientists bought their groceries and collected their mail here. That legacy persisted: in 1984, the Santa Fe Institute was founded to study complex systems, hosting Nobel laureates Murray Gell-Mann and Philip Anderson. The National Center for Genome Resources arrived in 1994. Today the city sits at one vertex of the New Mexico Innovation Triangle alongside Los Alamos and Albuquerque, balancing its identity as an arts capital with deep roots in physics, computation, and genomics.

Every September, as aspens turn gold in the Sangre de Cristos, Santa Fe holds its Fiestas -- a tradition dating to 1919 that commemorates Diego de Vargas's reconquest. The climax is the burning of Zozobra, a towering marionette representing 'Old Man Gloom.' Thousands gather to watch it writhe and collapse in flames, symbolically incinerating the anxieties of the past year. It is a ritual that captures something essential about Santa Fe: a city that has absorbed conquest, displacement, and reinvention across four centuries, yet still gathers in its ancient plaza to celebrate survival with fire and light.