Hotel Santa Fe

Most of what a hotel says about itself concerns the building. The most consequential fact about this one is on the deed.

Mah-waan

Mah-waan is welcome in the Picuris dialect of Northern Tiwa, and it is the title of the book Daniel Gibson published in 2024 about this hotel and the people who own it. Picuris Pueblo owns Hotel Santa Fe. Not a stake, not a naming arrangement, not a cultural consultancy. The whole of it.

Picuris describes its own position without ornament: about twenty miles southwest of Taos and fifty miles north of Santa Fe, on the High Road, under the Sangre de Cristos in Taos County. Archaeologists now believe the village there was among the largest in the northern Rio Grande six centuries ago. It is today the smallest of New Mexico’s nineteen pueblos by population. The hotel stands fifty miles south of it, at 1501 Paseo de Peralta on the eastern edge of the Railyard, about fifteen minutes on foot from the Plaza.

Fifty-One

Local business people approached Picuris leaders in 1988 about building a hotel together. The structure they arrived at gave the Pueblo fifty-one percent and a consortium of four outside partners forty-nine. The outside partners, known locally as the 49ers, were Bill Zeckendorf, Joe Schepps, Earl Potter, and Paul Margetson.

Ground was broken on February 17, 1990. The hotel opened in March 1991, designed by Jerry Exline and Richard Yates in the Pueblo Revival vocabulary on a cruciform plan that kept the Siberian elms already standing on the lot. The Hacienda, thirty-five rooms and suites by Van H. Gilbert Architects, was added in September 2001.

Forty-Nine

On January 3, 2023, the Pueblo acquired the remaining forty-nine percent from the surviving partnership. The hotel now describes itself as the only wholly Indigenous-owned hotel in Santa Fe.

Set that beside what was happening a mile northeast of here a century ago. The Indian Detours left the lobby of La Fonda from 1926: motorcars, trained couriers, and scheduled visits out to the pueblos, sold by a railway. Sixty-five years separate that departure from this opening, and thirty-two more separate the opening from the day the Pueblo bought the rest of its own hotel. The measure that matters is not sentiment. It is who signs.

What Is Actually Here

Allan Houser’s larger-than-life bronze The Offering stands at the main east entrance. Houser was Chiricahua Apache and the most consequential Native sculptor of the last century, and a hotel that opens with a Houser is making a claim it then has to keep. Pueblo pottery, regional weaving, and locally made pine furniture run through the rooms and the public spaces. The Matachines are danced here at Christmas. Southwest Seminars, an independent nonprofit, has held its Monday evening public lecture series in the hotel for years, on archaeology, history, Native culture, and natural science, and Picuris scholars have spoken in it.

If the subject holds you, the Santa Fe Indian Market, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian are where the same question about who presents Native work, and on whose terms, is argued out at institutional scale. Of the properties in hotels and resorts, this is the one that answers it commercially, which is the least abstract answer available and the hardest to walk back.

Common Questions

Who owns Hotel Santa Fe?

Picuris Pueblo. The Pueblo held fifty-one percent from the hotel’s opening in March 1991 and acquired the remaining forty-nine percent on January 3, 2023.

Where is Hotel Santa Fe?

At 1501 Paseo de Peralta, on the eastern edge of the Railyard, roughly fifteen minutes on foot from the Plaza. The Hacienda wing was added in 2001.