Taos

Taos Pueblo has stood at the foot of the mountains for about a thousand years, its people farming the valley and trading with the Plains nations to the east. Spanish explorers reached it in 1540, and a mission followed in the 1600s, but relations were hostile: the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 was organised in part from Taos, under the leader Popé. After the Spanish returned, colonists settled the valley, and the town of Don Fernando de Taos grew up around a fortified plaza in the late 18th century, with farming villages such as Ranchos de Taos nearby.

Taos lay on trade routes linking Mexico with the Plains, and the pueblo's autumn trade fairs drew Comanche and other Plains traders. In the 1820s American fur trappers made it a base; Kit Carson settled here and married into a local family. After US forces took control of New Mexico in 1846, the territory's new governor, Charles Bent, was killed in his Taos house in the revolt of January 1847, and American troops bombarded the pueblo's church, where rebels had taken refuge.

In 1898 two painters, Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips, stopped in Taos after their wagon wheel broke, and stayed; the Taos Society of Artists followed in 1915. The heiress Mabel Dodge Luhan drew D. H. Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams. In 1970 the federal government returned Blue Lake, the pueblo's sacred lake in the mountains, after a long campaign. The ski valley opened in the 1950s, communes arrived in the 1960s, and art and tourism have shaped the town since.

Three cultures live side by side in Taos. Taos Pueblo keeps its own language, Tiwa, and its own government and ceremonies, many of them closed to outsiders; its feast days, dances and pow wow are among the most important events in the valley. Hispano families descended from the Spanish settlers maintain Catholic traditions, adobe chapels, acequias (shared irrigation ditches) and a northern New Mexican Spanish.

The third strand is the artists and newcomers who have arrived since 1898. The Taos Society of Artists painted the pueblo and the landscape in ways that helped create the popular image of the Southwest; later came modernists, writers, the painter Agnes Martin and generations of craftspeople, and galleries still line the streets around the plaza. Mud-plastered adobe, rebuilt and replastered by hand, gives the town its look.

Outdoor life is a large part of local identity: skiing on steep slopes, rafting the gorge, fishing and long mountain hikes. Taos also has a reputation for independent and alternative living, from the experimental Earthship homes first developed near the town to off-grid builders and healers. The tension between a tourist economy and the needs of long-rooted local families is a constant theme in town politics.

About 6,500 people live in the town of Taos, and a few times that many in the surrounding county, spread through villages, the pueblo and scattered homes on the mesa. Tourism, art, skiing, schools, health care and local government provide most jobs, and wages are low by national standards.

Housing is a pressing issue: holiday homes take up part of the stock, and costs are high for many working families and seasonal workers. Water is another: irrigation ditches still divide river water among fields, and drought and wildfire risk weigh on the valley.

The day starts early and ends early. Shops and galleries around the plaza are busiest in daytime, many restaurants close by mid-evening, and nightlife is modest. Weekends bring visitors from Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and from Texas and Oklahoma in summer and ski season. Many people drive to Santa Fe or Albuquerque for big shopping or specialist care.

Taos eats northern New Mexican food. The core is chile, grown in the state and served as a red sauce from dried pods or a green one from roasted fresh chiles; asking for both is called ordering it "Christmas". It is poured over enchiladas, burritos, eggs and potatoes, and comes beside sopaipillas — puffy fried pillows of dough eaten with honey. Posole, a stew of hominy corn with pork and chile, and carne adovada, pork slowly cooked in red chile, are favourites, and blue corn tortillas are a local speciality.

Breakfast is a serious meal: breakfast burritos and huevos rancheros smothered in chile fill the diners in the morning. Bread is traditionally baked in hornos, the beehive-shaped outdoor earth ovens found in both Pueblo and Hispano communities. Biscochitos, crisp anise-flavoured cookies, are the state cookie and a traditional Christmas treat.

The town also has bakeries, coffee shops and restaurants that use local lamb, trout and produce from small farms watered by the acequias, and a farmers' market brings valley growers to town in summer and autumn.