Sunny Santa Fe: An Easy Destination for Families in Any Season

If you’re looking for a laid-back family travel destination in the Southwest, one with the perfect mix of blue skies, outdoor activities, arts, culture and interesting history, it’s time to add New Mexico to your family-travel bucket list.

From the moment our plane touched down in Albuquerque to our hike to one of Santa Fe’s best views on the last day of our visit, I knew that New Mexico would be a place we’d return to again. We had taken several trips to Arizona and were looking for a different vacation spot in the sunny Southwest. Although I wasn’t sure whether the kids would love it as much as we adults would, as soon as I started researching all the area had to offer to families, I knew we had the makings of a good trip.

What makes Santa Fe, New Mexico, so special?

What we love most about Santa Fe is that somehow, despite being a very popular travel destination, it has a more laid-back feel than we had expected. It might be that we were there during a shoulder season, but the overall vibe was relaxing from start to finish. We flew into the mellow Albuquerque International Sunport on a short, direct flight from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and picked up a rental car to make the one-hour drive to Santa Fe proper.

We noticed right away that Santa Fe has a distinctively European atmosphere. It was colonized by the Spanish in 1610 and is one of the earliest European settlements west of the Mississippi River. The Pueblo Revival style, a blend of Spanish colonial and indigenous elements, characterizes the city’s architecture, as seen in its adobe buildings, narrow streets and central plaza. Combine this with Santa Fe’s fascinating art and culture, interesting history and breathtaking landscapes, and it’s no wonder it’s such a popular place to visit.

When to visit

Santa Fe is a four-season destination, but if it’s fair weather you are looking for, the best times to visit are April–June and September–November. During the summer season, from June through August, you’ll enjoy temperatures ranging from the 50s to the 80s as well as a full special event calendar. However, you’ll also encounter big crowds and many lodgings that already have been booked far in advance. While summer can also get hot, there are plenty of indoor activities to enjoy, such as area museums. We visited in November and experienced a perfect combination of fewer crowds and surprisingly pleasant weather, although it did get a bit brisk at night.

Unforgettable Santa Fe experiences with kids

Immerse yourself in Santa Fe’s rich history on a walking tour of the Santa Fe Plaza and historic district.

You could spend days exploring Santa Fe on self-guided or guided walking tours. Santa Fe is the oldest state capital in the United States, with an intriguing blend of indigenous, Spanish and American traditions, and there are historic and artistic surprises to delight around every corner.

Begin by exploring the historic district and Santa Fe Plaza and the Palace of the Governors, which was built in 1610 and is the oldest public building in continuous use in the U.S. All year long, Native American craftspeople — primarily jewelry makers who have met rigorous requirements — sell their wares at the Palace, making it a great spot for gift shopping. Another interesting historic stop is San Miguel Chapel, the oldest church in the United States, and we loved gazing at The Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi when it was lit up at night. We also enjoyed peeking into art gallery windows and appreciated all the street art, such as the Instagrammable burro sculpture on Burro Alley.

For fun, download Tourism Santa Fe’s self-guided tours, which have themes like the Breakfast Burrito Tour, the Chocolate Trail and the Santa Fe Food Truck Tour. If you’d prefer to have an expert be your guide, Santa Fe Discovery Walking Tours is well-regarded, with interesting themes, such as the Downtown Santa Fe Ghost Tour. Children of a certain age get free admission to many of the walking tours.

Extend your Santa Fe walking tours to the revitalized historic Railyard, Farmers’ Market and Artisan Market.

While you can combine the city core and the Santa Fe Railyard on one of your walks, that’s a lot to see and do, especially for kids. We dedicated a separate afternoon to The Railyard, about a 17-minute walk southwest of the city’s central plaza, and still didn’t fit everything in. The Railyard served as an interchange of three railroads in the late-19th-and early-20th centuries. Today, it is a revitalized modern urban area with restaurants, shopping, a movie theater, the award-winning Railyard Park (with 28 individual gardens, art and a children’s playground), street art, and the thriving Santa Fe Farmers’ Market and the Railyard Artisan Market.

The Farmers’ Market is open on Saturdays, from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., year around, with a seasonal Tuesday market as well. The Railyard Artisan Market is open on Sundays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Tip: Download a free North Railyard map.

Interact with art like never before at the original Meow Wolf immersive art experience.

Once you set foot inside Meow Wolf’s “House of Eternal Return,” a fantastical Victorian home with a detailed backstory and passages to unexpected worlds, you’ll want to spend days there. Meow Wolf is highly interactive — combining art, technology and story — asking you to follow clues to solve the mystery of what happened to the family that once lived there. Along the way, you’ll discover many portals (the washing machine was a hit with our family!), and you can walk through on repeat and experience something new every time. Meow Wolf was founded in 2008 by a small collective of Santa Fe artists who wanted to “inspire creativity, exploration, and play for all ages”; it now has five exhibitions around the country.

General admission starts at $40.

Tip: While Meow Wolf is designed to be family-friendly for all ages, younger children and/or those with sensory challenges might find it overwhelming. These sensory guides and tips help make the experience accessible and enjoyable. No matter the age of your children, be sure to come up with a clear plan ahead of time, because the space is vast.

Follow in the footsteps of the Ancestral Pueblo peoples at breathtaking Bandelier National Monument.

Our older teen is not a big fan of hiking, but visiting Bandelier National Monument ended up being one of the highlights of our trip. Bandelier protects the traditional ancestral lands of more than 23 tribal nations and encompasses 33,000 acres of canyons and mesas, with their petroglyphs, cliff dwellings and beautiful landscapes.

We had the Tsankawi Village Trail, on State Road 4 just outside the main section of the park, mostly to ourselves. We enjoyed this 1.6-mile loop along a mesa, which features cave dwellings, petroglyphs and an Ancestral Puebloan village. We then visited the main visitor center and walked the popular Pueblo Loop Trail, which, though a must-see, is much more crowded than the Tsankawi Trail, even in the off-season. This 1.4-mile loop meanders through fascinating archeological sites, and you can even climb ladders to cavate alcoves, but be prepared to wait.

The cost of a standard pass is $15–$25. You can also purchase an annual park pass for $45 or use your America the Beautiful Pass to enter the park.

Tip: If you can, pay a visit to Valles Caldera National Preserve, about 30 minutes away. The name says it all: The big draw here is a dormant volcano.

Experience the joy of working with clay at the bustling ceramics co-op Paseo Pottery.

If you’ve never tried throwing a pot, let me tell you, it’s harder than it looks! We enjoyed a private two-hour pottery wheel experience led by a skilled Santa Fe ceramics artist at the Paseo Pottery studio, located in the same neighborhood as Meow Wolf, and it was one of the highlights of our trip. During the pottery session, you’ll enjoy beverages, a tour of the studio and a comprehensive wheel-throwing lesson. This class is focused on wheel basics, and you don’t fire, glaze or take your creation home.

The cost is $115 per person. Sessions can be booked online. If you’re on a tighter budget, the studio offers walk-in pottery-painting sessions daily from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The cost for this is $35 per person. Pieces are ready for pickup between three and five days later, and shipping is available.

Tip: Make sure you bring or wear clothes that you’re comfortable getting dirty, because that is part of the fun.

Learn about a dark but fascinating part of our country’s history at the Manhattan Project National Historical Park in Los Alamos.

Stopping in Los Alamos, one of three main sites of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, was a spontaneous add-on to our day trip to Bandelier, and it turned out to be one of the highlights for our older teen. The Manhattan Project was a top-secret government project during World War II. Its mission was to design, build and deploy atomic weapons before Nazi Germany did. Isolated on the top of a mesa, Los Alamos provided an ideal setting for this secret operation, which was led by J. Robert Oppenheimer. Drop by the visitor center to speak with a ranger, visit the Bradbury Science Museum, and take a guided or self-guided historical walking tour (which includes a visit to Oppenheimer’s house). The historical tour features multiple perspectives as well as historical context.

This is a free experience.

Tips: Download the National Park Service app ahead of time to queue up a map for your self-guided tour. Sugar & Cream Cafe, just a short walk from the start of the historical tour, is a nice stop for a beautiful treat, specialty cold and hot drinks, and lunch.

Be inspired by one of the most significant artists of the 20th century at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

I’ve always loved smaller art museums, because they don’t overwhelm; they also serve as a wonderful way to introduce children to art. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, while smaller in scale than most art museums, houses the world’s largest collection of this iconic artist’s work. Georgia O’Keeffe, an American modernist painter, is considered to be the first woman to gain the respect of New York City’s art world in the 1920s, and is renowned for her paintings of flowers and desert landscapes. The museum introduces you to the breadth of her career, and houses everything from her lesser-known early works to her famous landscapes. You can also visit her home and studio at Abiquiu.

General admission to the museum is $22, $12 for kids ages 6–18, and free for kids younger than 5. Tickets can be purchased online in advance.

Tip: We enjoyed a pick-me-up at The Royal Rawness, just a short walk away from the museum. It offers fair trade coffee drinks (cocoa, too), yummy baked goods for the kids, and a nice atmosphere, with a chess set indoors and fire pits outside.

I hope these ideas inspire you to book a family trip to sunny Santa Fe this year! Blue skies and adventures await in this cultural capital of the American Southwest.