We visited Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the beginning of August 2026 mainly in order to attend the Santa Fe Opera Festival. We were invited to the Festival as part of a group of artistic staff plus supporters from Garsington Opera which develops operas jointly with Santa Fe, We were particularly going to see Mozart's The Magic Flute which will come to Garsington in the summer of 2028. While we were there we also saw Madame Butterfly and Eugene Onegin, and explored the old town of Santa Fe. The Santa Fe Opera was founded in 1956. Together with Canyon Road, a major international art market, it has made the city an UNESCO Creative City.
We flew into Dallas Fort Worth and changed planes to Albuquerque. Dallas airport is vast. Texas is a chequerboard of irrigated patches of land, and New Mexico is mainly desert.
Santa Fe has a population of about 90,000. It is the oldest state capital in the United States, predating the formation of the USA. It was inhabited by indigenous people before the arrival of the Spanish in 1540. The Palace of the Governors was built by the Spanish in 1610 and is the oldest continuously occupied public building in the United States. When Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, it became the capital of the Mexican territory of Nueva México. The U.S. Army occupied Santa Fe in 1846 and it became the capital of the US New Mexico territory in 1851.
In 1912 New Mexico became the 47th U.S. State with Santa Fe as its capital and civic leaders and artists launched an initiative to codify the distinctive Santa Fe Style (Pueblo Revival adobe architecture) to preserve its unique heritage and boost tourism.
The Santa Fe Opera house is built out in the desert. The sun sets behind the stage over the desert foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, where the atomic bomb was developed at Los Alamos. These images show the architecture of the opera house from inside while it was light and outside after dark. The set of Madame Butterfly gives a glimpse of the mountains in the background just after the sun had set. The view was blocked out by the Victorian Music Hall stage for The Magic Flute.
The city is full of fascinating and unexpected details, including many from the cathedral.
The most famous artist who adopted Santa Fe later in life was Georgia O'Keefe and there is an amazing museum dedicated to her.
She was married to photographer Alfred Stieglitz who is famous for his pioneering series of abstract cloud photographs titled Equivalents. The skies in Santa Fe are magnificent and I couldn't resist taking some "Equivalents" of my own.
