Palace of the Governors

The Palace of the Governors fills the north side of the Santa Fe plaza, a long single-storey adobe behind a portal of round posts. Spanish, Pueblo, Mexican and American governments have all run New Mexico from inside it, and it is usually called the oldest public building in continuous use in the United States.

Its date is softer than the 1610 on every sign. Pedro de Peralta founded the villa as the provincial capital in 1610, but cutting timbers and making adobes took years; Juan de Eulate, governor from 1618 to 1625, claimed credit for the first government buildings, and the oldest foundations found so far date to about 1625. After the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 the Pueblo people who held the town built a multistory pueblo on top of it, using adobes from the parish church they had pulled down, and lived in it for twelve years. Lew Wallace finished writing Ben-Hur here while he was territorial governor at the end of the 1870s.

What a visitor sees today is partly an invention. By the turn of the twentieth century the palace had been Americanized with a wooden porch and balustrade. When the new Museum of New Mexico took it over in 1909, the restoration of 1909 to 1913 stripped that away and gave the building heavy posts, carved corbels and soft earthen parapets drawn from local tradition. The result, the Spanish-Pueblo Revival, went on to set the look of Santa Fe and much of the state.

Native artists from the pueblos sell jewelry and pottery under the portal through a program the museum runs. The palace itself is entered through the New Mexico History Museum, which opened behind it in 2009, on Lincoln Avenue.