Join the fiesta as Santa Fe celebrates 400 years

SANTA FE -- On a brilliant New Mexico morning, a festive mood pervades a once-derelict part of the city just blocks from its historic core. Growers hawk heaps of fresh garlic and mounds of organic snap peas. Couples leisurely sip coffee at outdoor tables as a live steel drum band provides the soundtrack.

It's a quintessentially local scene, but there isn't a howling coyote, bleached cow skull or any other clichéd vestige of Santa Fe Style in sight.

Indeed, on the eve of its 400th birthday, the nation's oldest state capital is out to prove wrong those visitors who figure there can't be much new about a city this venerable.

Exhibit A: the Santa Fe Railyard, a vibrant area of cutting-edge galleries, parks and performance spaces. Exhibit B: a stunning new history museum that chronicles the 400 years since Spanish colonization, paying homage to the Pueblo Indians, Franciscan friars, mountain men, atomic scientists and even extraterrestrials who have contributed to New Mexico's irresistible cultural stew.

Iconic buildings, including the gorgeous honey-hued St. Francis Assisi Cathedral, have been restored inside and out. The city is easier to reach, too. This summer, American became the first major carrier to establish daily air service. New rail service connects Santa Fe and Albuquerque. And on Labor Day weekend, the city kicks off 16 months of 400th-anniversary events with Viva! Santa Fe.

New attractions notwithstanding, history — and art — have long been Santa Fe's stock in trade for drawing out-of-towners. And that hasn't changed.

"Santa Fe has this complex history," says local historian Adrian Bustamante. "It never became a modern U.S. town, thank God."

Bustamante is sitting on a bench in the Santa Fe Plaza recounting the spot's various incarnations. The pleasant square constituted the city's heart when the Spanish were calling the shots four centuries ago. It marked the end of the Santa Fe Trail, where traders unloaded and sold their wares in the 1800s. It beckoned the first artists, who, attracted by the clarity of the light, began flocking here in the 1890s. It was the city's living room through the late 1800s and into the mid-20th century, when this was still a mostly Hispanic city. And it remained a hub for fiestas and other events after Anglos became a majority in the late 1940s.