(photo illustration by Richard Nichols)
Billed as a luxury hotel, the Loretto can hardly be missed as one wanders around in Santa Fe. It is the “Santa Fe look” on steroids.
Santa Fe stands as a monument to “branding.” It seems to me that the city is dedicated to tourists, brown hardened mud with wooden poles sticking out of it– and western art. There is no place to park without a greedy meter (if you can find one at all) and no buildings that don’t have either the Adobe or Mission style. This goes on for many many miles around the city.
Actually, the adobe-look is created by using regular concrete blocks covered with cement that is tinted just the right color of brown. Those new mexicans think they are fooling us tourists and old mexicans into believing that this is hardened sun-baked mud. As one comedian put it, “how come there are so many wooden poles sticking out of these adobe huts when the area is a desert with few trees?” Home Depot must be making a killing on fence posts.
People who move there and build homes that don’t conform to the Santa Fe template find that they can’t resell them easily. As a result, almost every home in the Santa Fe area is a variation on the theme you see here. It is a land with many thousands of adobe buildings.
Santa Fe is a wonderful, festive and pleasant place to visit, but if you want to live there, you need a great amount of money. Some of the simpler homes we saw in the arts area cost several millions of dollars. That about sums it up. We had a great time and the artwork throughout the city was quite beautiful. Even the service stations are elegant in Santa Fe.
During our 3 day stay we visited the city’s only apparent dime store. An elderly guy bumped into me as I was trying on a cap. Four hours later I realized I was missing my cell phone. When I returned to my hotel room, I called my own number and a guy answered in Spanish.
