What are the Best Things to Do in New Mexico?
The best things to do in New Mexico include exploring Santa Fe, visiting White Sands and Carlsbad Caverns, touring historic pueblos, eating New Mexican food, soaking in hot springs, hiking, and taking a road trip through the state’s smaller towns and landscapes.
If this is your first trip, these are the experiences I would prioritize.
1. Explore Santa Fe’s Historic Center
Santa Fe is the best place to start if you want to understand New Mexico’s history, architecture, and culture. The compact historic center is built around the Santa Fe Plaza, with adobe buildings, old churches, museums, restaurants, galleries, and shops all within walking distance.
Visit the Palace of the Governors, wander the surrounding streets, and then continue toward Canyon Road, where more than a hundred galleries occupy old adobe homes and courtyards. You can see a surprising amount of Santa Fe without ever getting back in the car.
2. Experience Albuquerque’s Balloon Fiesta
Nothing quite prepares you for seeing hundreds of hot-air balloons rise over Albuquerque at the same time. The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta takes place for nine days each October and is the largest balloon festival in the world.
The morning mass ascensions are the main attraction, but evening balloon glows, special-shape balloons, competitions, and the ability to walk among the balloons on the launch field make the event much more than something you simply watch from a distance. If you cannot visit during Fiesta, balloon companies operate flights over the Rio Grande Valley throughout much of the year.
3. Walk Across White Sands
White Sands National Park is one of the most unusual landscapes in the United States. Miles of brilliant white gypsum dunes rise from the Tularosa Basin, creating a landscape that looks more like snow than desert.
You can drive the scenic road through the dunes, walk one of the shorter trails, sled down the sand, or stay for sunset when the dunes take on blue, pink, and purple tones. Alamogordo is the closest city and makes the easiest base for exploring the park.
4. Visit a Pueblo
New Mexico’s pueblos offer the chance to experience living communities whose architecture, traditions, and history stretch back centuries. Some sit dramatically atop desert mesas, while others are built around multi-story adobe structures that have been inhabited for generations. Visiting one gives you a perspective on New Mexico that you simply cannot get from a museum or historic site.
Taos Pueblo is famous for its iconic multi-story adobe buildings and has been continuously inhabited for centuries. Acoma Sky City rises roughly 300 feet above the surrounding desert on a massive mesa and is one of the most striking places in the state. If you’re staying in Albuquerque, the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center is an excellent introduction to New Mexico’s 19 Pueblo nations.
5. Descend Into Carlsbad Caverns
Carlsbad Caverns National Park contains one of the largest and most impressive cave systems in North America. The main attraction is the enormous Big Room, filled with stalactites, stalagmites, columns, and other formations on a scale that is difficult to appreciate until you are underground.
Take the Natural Entrance Trail if you can. Instead of riding the elevator straight down, the trail drops more than 700 feet through the cavern before eventually reaching the Big Room. During bat season, you can also stay until evening to watch thousands of bats leave the cave.
6. Eat New Mexican Food
New Mexican food is reason enough to visit the state. The defining ingredient is chile, and one of the first questions you will hear at restaurants is “Red or green?” If you want both, you can order it Christmas.
Start with enchiladas covered in red or green chile, try a green chile cheeseburger, carne adovada, and sopapillas with honey. The food varies considerably around the state, so eating your way through New Mexico is less about finding one definitive restaurant and more about trying regional variations as you travel.
7. Explore Ancient Ruins
Human history in New Mexico stretches back thousands of years, and archaeological sites are scattered across almost every part of the state.
Chaco Culture National Historical Park preserves enormous ancestral Pueblos in a remote desert canyon. Bandelier National Monument has cliff dwellings and archaeological sites you can reach on foot, while Aztec Ruins contains one of the best-preserved great houses in the state. Farther south, Gila Cliff Dwellings are built directly into natural caves high above a forested canyon.
8. Soak in a Hot Spring
New Mexico’s volcanic geology has left hot springs scattered around the state, ranging from polished resorts to undeveloped pools beside rivers and roads.
Ojo Caliente is a popular spa experience, with multiple mineral pools in the high desert north of Santa Fe. Jemez Springs combines hot springs with one of the prettiest canyon drives in the state, while Truth or Consequences has an entire downtown district built around geothermal water. For something simpler, there are many roadside hot springs scattered across the state like Black Rock or Montezuma Hot Springs.
9. Take a New Mexico Road Trip
In New Mexico, the drive between attractions is part of the attraction itself. Long stretches of open desert, mountain passes, historic villages, old mining towns, roadside oddities, and ancient sites make it worth slowing down instead of simply driving from city to city.
The High Road to Taos winds through old northern New Mexico villages, the Turquoise Trail connects Albuquerque and Santa Fe through Madrid and Cerrillos, the Enchanted Circle loops through the mountains from Taos to Red River, and the Trail of the Mountain Spirits explores the forests and mining country around Silver City. If you are unsure how to combine everything, use the New Mexico trip planner or start with one of the suggested itineraries.
10. Experience Weird New Mexico
New Mexico has always had a weird side from aliens to strange government installations and everything in between. It’s part of the state’s charm and one of the reasons it is so different from anywhere else in the country.
Roswell has built an entire tourism industry around aliens and the 1947 UFO incident. Santa Fe’s Meow Wolf turns a former bowling alley into a sprawling interactive art maze, while the Very Large Array looks like something from a science-fiction movie despite being a working radio astronomy observatory.
Then there are places like Pie Town, the World’s Largest Pistachio, bizarre roadside attractions, ghost towns, and isolated monuments scattered across the desert. New Mexico’s mix of aliens, art, science, ghost towns, and roadside oddities is a big part of what makes the state feel so distinct.
11. Hike Through New Mexico’s Different Landscapes
Hiking in New Mexico can mean desert peaks, volcanic badlands, forested canyons, or high alpine trails, often within the same region. That variety is what makes the state especially good for exploring on foot.
The Organ Mountains rise dramatically from the Chihuahuan Desert near Las Cruces, while El Malpais crosses ancient lava flows and volcanic terrain. Northern New Mexico has high-elevation forests and alpine trails, the Jemez Mountains are filled with canyons and volcanic formations, and the Gila Wilderness offers some of the wildest backcountry in the Southwest.
You do not need to be a serious backpacker either. Many of the state’s best landscapes can be experienced on hikes of only a few miles.
12. Go Skiing
New Mexico may look like a desert on a map, but northern and central New Mexico receive enough snow to support a surprisingly good ski scene.
Taos Ski Valley has the biggest reputation and some of the most challenging terrain in the state. Ski Santa Fe is easily accessible from Santa Fe, while Angel Fire offers a larger resort atmosphere with year-round recreation. Smaller areas such as Pajarito Mountain, Sipapu, and Ski Cloudcroft provide quieter (and much cheaper) alternatives!
Ski season also gives you a completely different version of New Mexico than the desert landscapes most first-time visitors expect.
13. Explore New Mexico’s Wild West History
Billy the Kid, frontier forts, mining camps, cattle towns, and old stage routes are still woven into the landscape of New Mexico.
Lincoln preserves much of the town associated with Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War, while Fort Sumner marks the place where he was eventually killed. Mesilla retains its old plaza and territorial-era buildings, and Silver City grew from the mining boom that transformed southwestern New Mexico.
Rather than being confined to museums, much of this history survives in entire towns that you can still walk through today.
14. See New Mexico’s Dark Skies
Once you get away from Albuquerque and Santa Fe, much of New Mexico becomes extremely dark at night.
The Cosmic Campground in the Gila National Forest was created specifically for astronomy, while Chaco Culture and Clayton Lake are also known for dark skies and stargazing. But you do not necessarily need to visit a designated site. Large parts of western, central, and southern New Mexico have so little development that simply camping somewhere remote can produce an incredible view of the Milky Way.
New Mexico’s dry climate, high elevation, and large stretches of open land are also why so many professional observatories have been built here.
15. Attend a Uniquely New Mexican Event
While there’s never a bad time to visit New Mexico, the state has a calendar full of events that are worth planning around.
October brings the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, while late summer brings the fiery spectacle of Zozobra in Santa Fe and the Hatch Chile Festival in southern New Mexico. Roswell celebrates aliens every summer at the UFO Festival, and Deming somehow manages to build an entire weekend around racing ducks during the Great American Duck Race.
These events range from internationally famous festivals to strange local traditions, but all of them show you a side of New Mexico that is difficult to experience on an ordinary sightseeing trip.
Read: What are the Biggest Events in New Mexico?
Planning a New Mexico Trip
The hardest part of visiting New Mexico is not finding things to do, but deciding which parts of the state to combine into one trip.
If you’re starting from scratch, read How Many Days Do You Need in New Mexico? to get a sense of how much time you need to see the state. Check the Best Time of Year to Visit New Mexico to lock in a timeframe, and then use the New Mexico Trip Planner to start building your own route!