Albuquerque

People lived along this stretch of the Rio Grande long before the city existed: petroglyphs carved into the basalt of the West Mesa date back many centuries, and by the 1500s around twenty Tiwa pueblos stood along the river. Two of them, Sandia and Isleta, survive on the edges of the modern city. In 1706 the governor of Spanish New Mexico, Francisco Cuervo y Valdés, founded La Villa de Alburquerque, naming it after the Duke of Alburquerque, viceroy of New Spain. It was an outpost on El Camino Real, the trade road linking Mexico City with Santa Fe, and its plaza and the church of San Felipe de Neri remain the heart of Old Town.

After the United States took New Mexico in the 1840s, an army post operated here until 1867. The decisive change came in 1880, when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway arrived and placed its depot about two miles east of the plaza. A New Town grew up around the tracks, and the old settlement remained separate until the 1920s. Tuberculosis patients came for the dry air, among them the future governor Clyde Tingley and the architect John Gaw Meem, whose Pueblo Revival style shaped the University of New Mexico.

Route 66 reached the city in 1926, first along Fourth Street and later along Central Avenue. Kirtland Air Force Base, opened in 1939, and Sandia National Laboratories, founded in 1949, made Albuquerque part of the atomic age, and the population passed 200,000 by 1960. Downtown declined as the city sprawled, and many historic buildings were demolished in the 1960s and 1970s. Microsoft was founded here, and in recent years film and television production has become a large industry.

Albuquerque's culture is a meeting of Pueblo, Hispano and Anglo-American traditions. About half of the population is Hispanic or Latino, and the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, run by the state's pueblos, presents their history and art. The National Hispanic Cultural Center in Barelas is a major venue for Hispanic arts, and Pueblo Revival and Pueblo Deco buildings, adobe walls and Route 66 neon give the city its look.

The Balloon Fiesta each October is the event the city is best known for, the largest balloon festival in the world, with more than 500 balloons rising over the north of the city. Christmas brings luminarias — small paper-bag lanterns lit along paths and walls — above all in Old Town, and the summer New Mexico Arts and Crafts Fair has been held every year since 1961. The Gathering of Nations, long North America's largest powwow, and the New Mexico State Fair have both been held at Expo New Mexico.

The city has become a centre of film and television production, with a major Netflix studio, and several well-known crime dramas have been set and filmed on its streets, drawing fans to their locations. Sport means the Isotopes, a minor-league baseball team whose name comes from an episode of The Simpsons, the New Mexico United soccer club and the University of New Mexico Lobos. Residents call the city ABQ, Burque or the Duke City.

The 2020 census counted about 565,000 people in the city, and the metropolitan area had about 955,000 in 2023, including Rio Rancho and the towns of the Rio Grande valley. Growth is hemmed in by the Sandia and Isleta pueblos to the north and south, Kirtland Air Force Base and the mountains, so new suburbs spread west across the mesa beyond Petroglyph National Monument.

The economy rests on science, medicine and technology — Sandia National Laboratories and Kirtland Air Force Base are major parts of a technology corridor along the Rio Grande — along with the university, retail and film production. Life is shaped by the car and the climate: wide boulevards, low houses, strip malls and long views of the Sandia Mountains.

The city also faces serious problems. About 13.5 per cent of residents lived below the poverty line at the 2020 census, and homelessness, which has grown more visible since the 2000s, is concentrated around downtown and the International District off Central Avenue. The bosque, the riverside cottonwood forest, has shrunk since dams upstream changed the river's flood cycle, and a corridor of it is now protected as a state park.

Albuquerque cooks New Mexican food, a cuisine built on chile grown along the Rio Grande and in the Hatch Valley to the south. The defining question in any restaurant is 'red or green?' — red chile sauce from dried ripe pods or green chile from roasted fresh ones; ordering both is called 'Christmas'. Enchiladas are served rolled or stacked flat, carne adovada is pork slow-cooked in red chile, and sopaipillas, puffy fried bread, are eaten with honey.

Green chile turns up everywhere: in stew, on cheeseburgers, in breakfast burritos wrapped with eggs, potatoes and bacon or sausage, and even in national fast-food chains. Posole, a stew of hominy and pork, is one of the great Christmas traditions, tamales are a common traditional dish, and biscochitos, anise-flavoured biscuits, are the state cookie.

Old Town's restaurants serve New Mexican food in historic adobe houses, while Nob Hill and downtown have most of the newer restaurants, cafés and craft breweries.