The adobe city
Santa Fe
New Mexico's capital, where a city rule keeps buildings in earth-coloured adobe style with turquoise trim.
Why Santa Fe is adobe brown
Santa Fe, founded by Spanish settlers in 1610, sits at over 2,000 metres in northern New Mexico. Its buildings follow the forms of Pueblo and Spanish adobe houses: thick walls of sun-dried mud brick, rounded corners, flat roofs and projecting wooden beams. In the early 20th century artists and officials promoted this as the local style, and a city ordinance of 1957 requires buildings in the historic districts to use it, in earth tones. Even petrol stations and car parks comply. Against the brown, doors and window frames are painted turquoise or blue, a colour that local tradition says keeps evil away. In autumn, strings of drying red chillies, called ristras, hang by the doors.
Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.
Colours tied to Santa Fe
Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Santa Fe, New Mexico" on Wikipedia. If you know Santa Fe and we have it wrong, tell us.
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The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Sedona Us: Adam Baker, CC BY 2.0, source
- Miami Beach Us: Massimo Catarinella, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- New Orleans Us: thepipe26, CC BY 2.0, source
- Charleston Us: Ymblanter, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- San Francisco Us: Lightandtruth, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- New York Us: Z22, CC BY-SA 3.0, source