The road south from I-40 runs through a broad valley of mesas and, after about a dozen miles, comes to the Sky City Cultural Center at the foot of a sheer sandstone mesa more than 350 feet high. On top is Haak'u, the village the Spanish called Acoma, some three hundred houses of stone and adobe; the name is usually explained as the place prepared. About fifty people, most of them elders, live up there all year without electricity or running water, and most Acoma families live in the farming villages below and come up for feast days.
The pueblo is seen only on its own terms. Visitors book a guided tour of about ninety minutes at the cultural center, ride a shuttle up, and buy a camera permit beforehand. Tours run most of the year but stop for ceremonies, when the mesa closes to outsiders. The cultural center, opened in 2006, holds the Haak'u Museum and its pottery.
At the heart of the tour is San Esteban del Rey, built between 1629 and about 1641 under Fray Juan Ramírez by Acoma people forced to the work. They carried earth up the mesa for the walls and the graveyard on their backs, and hauled the roof beams, some of them thirty feet long, from the slopes of Mount Taylor, Kaweshtima, thirty to forty miles away. Acoma guides tell that plainly. In the revolt of 1680 the people of Acoma killed their priest but left the church standing, and it is one of the few seventeenth-century missions in New Mexico to survive. The Christmas dances held inside it from December 25 to 28 are open to the public.
Those who want can end the tour on foot, down a stairway cut into the mesa's rock.
The closest stops worth working into your route