8 Fairy-Tale Small Towns In New Mexico

The fairy tales that shaped childhoods run on a few reliable ingredients: an old village that time seems to have skipped, a mountain wilderness at the edge of town, a spring with restorative powers, a name that sounds invented. New Mexico supplies all of it, and none of it is made up. Adobe dwellings in the north have held families for a thousand years. A southern village named Truth or Consequences soaks visitors in mineral water. A high-desert plateau turned an artist's imagination into some of the most recognized paintings in American art. These eight small towns read like fairy-tale settings, yet every one of them is a real place a traveler can drive to this weekend.

Chama

A coal-fired steam locomotive still pulls out of Chama on a narrow-gauge track laid in 1880, climbing north into the Southern Rockies and over the Colorado line. The Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad operates the ride each summer and fall from the depot at the southern end of the line, and the railroad is the main reason most people come. Off the rails, the nearby Edward Sargent Wildlife Management Area makes for an easy walk with a decent chance of spotting elk and deer, and Heron Lake State Park a little to the south is popular with anglers, hikers, and birders after ospreys and the occasional mountain lion or black bear. Near the station, the Iron Rail Inn is set in a 1900 house with homestyle rooms, Starlink internet, and a restaurant on site.

Abiquiú

The red and white cliffs above Abiquiú Reservoir are the ones Georgia O'Keeffe painted for decades, and much of what visitors do in the town below traces back to her. Through the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, visitors can take a guided tour of the house and studio where she worked from 1949 to 1984, and hikers can reach the pale sandstone formation she called the "White Place," at Plaza Blanca, by registering in advance through the Dar al Islam center. Just north at Ghost Ranch, two small museums stand side by side, one with Triassic dinosaur fossils pulled from the surrounding rock and one covering regional anthropology, alongside a year-round schedule of artist workshops. For an overnight, the adults-only Grand Hacienda Inn has three suites with high-desert views a short drive from the ranch.

Taos

The multistory adobe houses at Taos Pueblo have sheltered the Tiwa-speaking Puebloan community for roughly a thousand years, which makes them among the oldest continuously inhabited structures in the country and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The rest of Taos spreads out below the Sangre de Cristo Mountains from there. The Millicent Rogers Museum holds thousands of pieces of Native American jewelry and pottery alongside Hispanic devotional art, and La Hacienda de los Martinez, a thick-walled adobe from 1804, preserves the rooms of a frontier family under Spanish colonial rule. Skiers head up to Taos Ski Valley, where The Blake, a few steps from Lift 1, has Southwestern-style rooms and a spa.

Cedar Crest

Twenty-three miles east of Albuquerque, on the back side of the Sandia Mountains, Cedar Crest is a small community in piñon-juniper forest, far quieter than the city below. A short trail at the John A. Milne and Gutierrez Canyon Open Space leads straight into that forest, while the Cienega Canyon Picnic Site to the north works for a family lunch or a longer ride on foot, bike, or horseback into the mountains. When the walking is done, the cooks at Ribs BBQ turn out New Mexico barbecue in town, and Elaine's Bed and Breakfast has guest rooms on a wooded lot set up for birdwatching, with a full breakfast each morning.

Truth or Consequences

Incorporated in 1916 as Hot Springs, this Rio Grande town held a vote in 1950 and renamed itself after the NBC radio game show Truth or Consequences in exchange for a live anniversary broadcast from Main Street. The old name still describes the main attraction: mineral water rising warm from the ground. Blackstone Hotsprings and Riverbend Hot Springs both keep private soaking pools, the latter set right along the Rio Grande, and exhibits at the Geronimo Springs Museum cover the town's history and the Native peoples who used these springs long before radio arrived. The Sierra Grande resort, part of the Ted Turner Reserve, includes a 30-minute soak with a stay, plus a full spa menu and guided trips into the surrounding country.

Hatch

The green chile that flavors half the plates in New Mexico grows in the fields around Hatch, and the crop shows up on nearly every sign in town. Over Labor Day weekend, the Hatch Chile Festival brings roasted chile, local crafts, and live music to the fairgrounds, though the harvest draws people year-round. Grajeda Hatch Chile Market stocks the peppers fresh and dried, and Sparky's Burgers, BBQ, and Espresso earned a regional following for a green chile cheeseburger worth the wait in line. For a night, the Historic St. Francis de Sales Inn fills a deconsecrated church where guests can book a room in the bell tower or a casita with its own courtyard.

Cloudcroft

At 8,676 feet in the Sacramento Mountains, Cloudcroft is cool pine forest sitting directly above the desert, about 88 miles northeast of Las Cruces. From the Trestle Depot Recreation Area on the west end of town, hikers can look out over the white gypsum dunes of White Sands National Park far below. The La Pasada Encantada Trail makes an easy family loop through the woods, and the Little Apache Trail north of town runs through ponderosa pine and mountain meadows where elk and deer graze. After a day out, The Cabins at Cloudcroft has pet-friendly cabins on a quiet lane just off the main street.

Silver City

Miners founded Silver City on the strength of its ore, and their money paid for a downtown of Victorian storefronts now full of galleries, with Light Art Space among the studios showing local work. The town is also the gateway to Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, where the Mogollon people carved homes into the canyon walls in the late 13th century and moved on after only a generation or two. That country rests on volcanic rock laid down roughly 30 million years ago, and traces of the mining era turn up even in town along the Boston Hill Trail System, where hikers share the slopes with javelinas and mule deer. West of town near the Gila National Forest, Bear Mountain Lodge pairs twelve guest rooms and two casitas with an on-site gallery, the Blue Dome, and a kitchen, Café Oso Azul.

Fairy Tales Built On Fact

What ties these eight towns together is that their fairy-tale surfaces rest on documented history. Steam trains have climbed the same mountain grade out of Chama since 1880. The adobe at Taos Pueblo predates almost every other lived-in building in the United States. The cliffs above Abiquiú are the ones hanging in museums as O'Keeffe canvases, and people came for the mineral springs at Truth or Consequences centuries before a radio host talked the town into a new name. The chile the rest of the state cooks with grows in the fields around Hatch, and pine forest full of elk covers the ridge above Cloudcroft, a short drive up from the dunes of White Sands. A visitor gets the fairy-tale feeling on arrival and the real thing on closer inspection, which is the rarer prize.