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One cold January a few years ago, the daughter of a French friend of mine wrote that she was coming to America. She would, of course, visit New York, and then she hoped to see some of the rest of the country, possibly les Grands Lacs . It was not hard to imagine a young tourist unfolding a map of the United States and settling on Rochester or Duluth as the kind of lakeside resort you might enjoy poking around in the off-season. What was hard was thinking where to send her instead. Miami? Los Angeles? Now I wouldn’t hesitate. I’d send her to Santa Fe.

I visited for the first time last December, approaching the city as most travelers do, on a shuttle bus from Albuquerque Airport sixty miles to the south. Santa Fe has always been isolated. When Spanish colonists founded the city in 1610 as part of their campaign to find gold and save souls in the New World, they were twelve hundred miles from Mexico City and five thousand miles from Madrid. Even by 1879, when the railroad approached, residents were so unenthusiastic about it that the Atchison, Topeka laid the tracks to Albuquerque instead. Then, as now, travelers bound for Santa Fe had to make the last leg of the journey by coach.

Yet once the bus pulls into the center of town, any inconvenience is forgotten. Santa Fe turns out to be an ideal destination. It is arranged, as all towns should be, around a grassy central square. It’s small enough so you can walk everywhere. It has a handful of fine museums, including the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian and the Museum of International Folk Art. Watching protectively over all is a cathedral, the story of which is told in a classic American novel you can read during your stay, Willa Gather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop . And perhaps most important for Easterners and Europeans, Indians live there.

But most impressive to me was the fabric of the city itself. Virtually all of Santa Fe is built of adobe, mud bricks that are fired and then covered with a smooth outer layer. Not all of the buildings are old; but old and new blend together, and the rich brown tone of the adobe sets off any color put against it. Even a yellow no-parking stripe painted on a curbstone looked as if an artist had placed it there.

It was Georgia O’Keeffe and other painters (John Sloan, Robert Henri, Ernest Blumenschein, and John Marin all worked in Santa Fe or in nearby Taos) who taught us to see beauty in these massive adobe shapes. The first Anglos to describe Santa Fe style didn’t think much of it. When the explorer Zebulon Pike saw the city in 1807, it reminded him of “a fleet of the flat-bottomed boats . . . descending the Ohio River”; he particularly remarked on the “miserable appearance of the houses.” And to William Goulding, a gold seeker passing through on his way to California in 1849, the city seemed a “vast quantity of pig styes.” Goulding was also dismissive of another current Santa Fe attraction, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mission churches with their beamed ceilings, whitewashed interiors, and carved and painted altarpieces—Christianity interpreted by untutored and not entirely convinced Indian craftsmen. When Goulding visited these churches, he saw not folk art but “a great number of the most miserable paintings, and wax figures, and looking glasses trimmed with tinsel.”

Today, though, all of this looks pretty good to us, especially at Christmastime, when rooftops are lit up with farolitos —lanterns made by anchoring candles in sand inside paper bags (or more practical electric versions of the same thing). Doorways are decorated with chili peppers, and pinon smoke from the city’s fireplaces makes the air smell like cinnamon. (“At our meanest tasks,” Bishop Latour writes home in Willa Gather’s novel, “we have a perpetual odour of incense about us.”) In December the summer crowds are gone. It is cold enough to snow occasionally, but the sun is still warm, and you feel you have the city to yourself.

Wandering through the tree-filled courtyard of Seña Plaza, a onetime Spanish hacienda now restored and given over to antiques shops, I realized that Santa Fe is where Bohemia meets the Old West. Ten years older than the settlement at Plymouth, Santa Fe represents three cultures—Spanish, Indian, and Anglo—filtered through the eyes of the artists and writers and anthropologists who began coming to the city in the 188Os. By the 1920s, more than merely describing what they found, they were leading the battle to preserve it.