Four Seasons Resort Rancho Encantado

Eight Miles

The Plaza is eight miles south of the front door. That is the whole proposition, and it is worth stating as a distance rather than as a mood.

The resort sits on 57 acres at 198 State Road 592, in the piñon hills above the Tesuque valley, with the Sangre de Cristos filling the east and the ground falling away west toward the Jemez. Sixty-five rooms and suites are spread across low casitas rather than stacked, so the building never assembles itself into a single mass you have to look at. What you look at instead is the country, which is the argument the property has been making, under several names, for most of a century.

Eight miles is far enough that the town becomes something you drive toward on purpose. It also means the northern half of the region is the part immediately available: Tesuque at the bottom of the hill, the high road beyond it, national forest trailheads within a short drive, and the light on the hills that has been drawing painters up this corridor since well before the museum downtown existed to explain why.

Four Names, One Hillside

The resort dates its own hospitality history to 1932, when the property operated as Rancho del Monte. It carried that name until 1968. It was rebuilt and reopened in a new form in 2008, and it became a Four Seasons in July 2012, at which point it took the Rancho Encantado name back.

Four names, several operators, one hillside. Very little of what makes this place work was built by any of them. The asset is the site, and the pattern across a hundred years is of successive owners arriving at the same conclusion about it.

Betty Egan

The name that stuck belongs to a woman. Betty Egan bought the ranch in 1968, turned it into a hotel, and named it Rancho Encantado after the state’s own nickname. She ran it until 1992, twenty-four years, which is longer than any operator since.

Accounts of her tenure name Jimmy Stewart, Johnny Cash, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Nelson Rockefeller, Peter Sellers, and Prince Rainier’s family among the guests, and the reason to repeat that list is not the glamour of it. It is that a single innkeeper eight miles north of a small city in New Mexico could draw that company for a quarter of a century. Egan is the answer to why the property has a name at all rather than a brand.

Terra, and the Country It Sits In

Terra is the restaurant, and it has become a destination on its own terms. It will have its own entry here, so we will leave it at the name.

The rest of what a stay here opens onto is the north. The Santa Fe Opera is a few minutes down the same corridor, which makes this the most straightforward base in the county for a July or August run of performances. The Plaza is eight miles and no trouble. And the property is unusually legible against the shape of the Santa Fe year, because at this elevation and this distance from town you get the season undiluted, which is the point of coming.

Of the three properties that open hotels and resorts, this is the one where the landscape is the amenity. The Inn of the Five Graces is made of its neighborhood. Bishop’s Lodge is made of its own long history. Rancho Encantado is made of the view, and has been sold on that basis by every owner it has had.

Common Questions

How far is Four Seasons Rancho Encantado from the Santa Fe Plaza?

About eight miles north, at 198 State Road 592 in the hills above the Tesuque valley. The Santa Fe Opera sits nearby on the same northern corridor.

What was the property before it became a Four Seasons?

It operated as Rancho del Monte from 1932, was renamed Rancho Encantado in 1968 by Betty Egan, was rebuilt and reopened in 2008, and became Four Seasons Resort Rancho Encantado in July 2012.