Things to do in Albuquerque

Landmark · West of downtown, off Central Avenue

The 1706 Spanish colonial villa the city grew from — a plaza, adobe walls, San Felipe de Neri church still in use since 1793, and the streets laid out around it.

Local tip: Go early on a weekday when the coach parties are not there, and walk two blocks off the plaza where the shops stop and it becomes a residential neighbourhood again. The church is the oldest building in the city and it is free to enter.

Nature · North-east foothills

One of the world's longest aerial tramways, climbing from the eastern edge of the city to a ridge at over 3,100 m in about fifteen minutes — from desert scrub to spruce forest and a view across 30,000 square kilometres.

Local tip: Go up in the late afternoon and come down after dark for the city lights, but check the wind: the tram closes for it more often than visitors expect. Take a jacket regardless of the temperature at the bottom — the top is routinely 10°C colder.

Nature · Along the river, the whole length of the city

The largest cottonwood forest in North America, running through the middle of the city with an uninterrupted 26 km paved trail down it that crosses no roads at all.

Local tip: Go at dawn in November when the sandhill cranes are in the valley, or in late October when the cottonwoods turn. The trail's total absence of road crossings makes it the only genuinely relaxing place to cycle in this city.

Neighborhood · Central Avenue, east of the university

The neon stretch of historic Route 66 beside UNM — 1930s and 1940s commercial architecture, independent shops and restaurants, and the closest thing Albuquerque has to a walkable high street.

Local tip: Walk it after dark for the restored neon, which the city has spent real money bringing back. This is where a car-free evening in Albuquerque is actually possible.

Culture · West Mesa, across the river

Around 24,000 petroglyphs carved into a seventeen-mile escarpment of volcanic basalt by ancestral Puebloan peoples and early Spanish settlers, with five extinct volcanoes on the skyline behind.

Local tip: Boca Negra Canyon is the quick version and Rinconada Canyon the better one. Go early — there is no shade whatsoever and the black rock radiates heat by mid-morning. It is a sacred site, not an attraction; the etiquette signs mean it.

Food · South of downtown

A Sunday market inside the vast 1920s Santa Fe Railway locomotive shops, a cathedral-scale industrial ruin with light coming through the broken clerestory, in the historic Barelas neighbourhood.

Local tip: Sundays from spring to autumn only. Combine it with the National Hispanic Cultural Center a few streets away, which is a serious institution that most visitors never hear about.