Santa Fe’s Burro Alley

The unique mingling of fine art galleries with gracious adobe homes on winding, shaded streets is the essence of Canyon Road’s charm. Although it is just blocks from Santa Fe’s busy plaza, Canyon Road’s special quality arises from its history as a rural neighborhood of small farms scattered along an old Indian trail.

The oldest adobe houses on Canyon Road date at least to the 1750s, built as modest, two or three-room dwellings by early Spanish settlers. Each house was the center of a family farm that raised corn and wheat and vegetables on the fertile patches of land bordering the Santa Fe River. In those days it would not have been unusual to see a small flock of sheep being driven up the Road on the way to green, mountain pastures deeper in the Canyon.

Farming in this high desert climate was always a challenge. Shortly after founding Santa Fe in 1610, the Spanish built an irrigation canal above the River, parallel to Canyon Road. Still in use, this Acequia Madre, or “mother ditch,” brought precious water out of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to sustain crops, livestock, and people in the Canyon Road neighborhood. Present day visitors should take a stroll down shaded Acequia Madre Street (just one block south of Canyon Road) to enjoy the ancient stone-lined canal and the beautiful adobe homes which have depended on it for centuries.

Since the earliest days of Spanish settlement, enterprising Santa Feans had walked their burros up the old “Road of the Canyon” to gather firewood in the mountain forests. Late in the day, residents would see the burros lumbering back down Canyon Road, laden with impossibly large stacks of split pinon wood that were destined for delivery to customers in town or for sale in Santa Fe’s Burro Alley.