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The Best Things to Do in New Mexico: National Parks, Pueblo History and Santa Fe Art
By Rebecca Thompson | May 3, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Rebecca Thompson has held many jobs over the years, from daily newspaper writer to middle-school math teacher. As a restaurant critic, she’s reviewed Michelin-starred fine-dining to gas station barbecue.
New Mexico is far bigger, older and more fascinating than its travel-brochure version. One day can mean climbing into cliff dwellings at Bandelier, standing in the white gypsum dunes near Alamogordo, or descending into the enormous limestone rooms of Carlsbad Caverns. Another can mean walking through Taos Pueblo, visiting Georgia O’Keeffe’s Abiquiú home, or trying to explain what just happened inside Meow Wolf without sounding like someone who has taken the wrong edible. Here are the best things to do in New Mexico.
ABQ BioPark
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ABQ BioPark is Albuquerque’s big family stop, but it’s built with enough range to hold the day together. The campus includes the zoo, aquarium, botanic garden and Tingley Beach, with animals, desert plants, river habitats and walking paths that make it feel more like four outings stitched into one. The zoo’s work with Mexican gray wolf conservation gives the visit a little more weight than the usual animal-and-gift-shop routine.
Best for: Zoo, aquarium and garden wandering
Bandelier National Monument
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Bandelier National Monument protects more than 33,000 acres of canyon and mesa country, with petroglyphs, standing masonry walls, and dwellings carved into the soft volcanic rock of Frijoles Canyon. The Pueblo Loop Trail gives the clearest introduction, while the side trip to Alcove House requires climbing wooden ladders to a site 140 feet above the canyon floor.
Best for: Ancient cliff dwellings and canyon hikes
Breaking Bad RV Tours
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This 3.5-hour tour visits more than 20 filming locations from Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul and El Camino, including Jesse’s house, the Dog House, Los Pollos Hermanos, the Crossroads Motel, Walt’s car wash and the laundromat. It’s a fan tour first, but it also shows how thoroughly Albuquerque became part of the visual language of the shows.
Best for: Breaking Bad locations and TV nostalgia
Carlsbad Caverns National Park
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Carlsbad Caverns National Park changes the scale of the trip fast. The self-guided Natural Entrance and Big Room routes descend into a limestone world of enormous chambers, mineral formations, and a kind of quiet that makes the surface feel suddenly thin. From April through October, the free Bat Flight Program adds an evening ranger talk at the amphitheater before bats leave the cavern entrance for the night.
Best for: Underground drama and bat-flight evenings
Chaco Culture National Historical Park
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Chaco Culture National Historical Park takes real planning, which is part of what keeps it from feeling like another quick stop on a scenic loop. From about 850 to 1250 CE, Chaco was a major center for Ancestral Pueblo people, and the park still holds monumental great houses, roads, kivas, and a canyon landscape that remains sacred to many Indigenous communities across the Southwest. Pueblo Bonito gives the clearest sense of the scale here, with masonry rooms and open plazas that make the usual historic-site language feel too small.
Best for: Remote history and monumental ancestral Pueblo sites
Georgia O’Keeffe Home & Studio and Ghost Ranch
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The Georgia O’Keeffe Home & Studio in Abiquiú and nearby Ghost Ranch work best together, because one shows the discipline of the artist’s life and the other shows the landscape that kept pulling her back. O’Keeffe’s Abiquiú home requires advance tickets, while Ghost Ranch spreads across 21,000 acres of red and gray hills, trails, tours, and Pedernal views that turn up again and again in her work. It’s one of the few art pilgrimages where the scenery doesn’t just explain the paintings; it keeps arguing with them.
Best for: O’Keeffe country and red-rock New Mexico
House of Eternal Return
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House of Eternal Return is the original Meow Wolf, the Santa Fe installation that helped turn immersive art into a national obsession before the phrase started showing up in every developer’s pitch deck. The exhibition unfolds through a mysterious Victorian house, with rooms, portals, secret passages, and a loose narrative that rewards wandering more than dutiful museum behavior. It’s funny, disorienting, beautifully built, and still one of the best arguments for Santa Fe as a place where art doesn’t have to behave.
Best for: Immersive art and sanctioned weirdness
Indian Pueblo Cultural Center
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The Indian Pueblo Cultural Center is one of the essential stops in Albuquerque because it’s not presenting Pueblo culture from the outside. It’s owned and operated by New Mexico’s 19 Pueblos, with exhibitions, murals by Pueblo artists, the Indian Pueblo Kitchen and a cultural dance program featuring dance groups from the Pueblos and neighboring Tribal Nations. The center gives visitors a public introduction to Pueblo history, art and foodways while making clear that some parts of that culture are shared and some are not.
Best for: Pueblo culture, art and Indigenous food
Old Town Albuquerque
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Old Town’s plaza dates to Albuquerque’s 1706 founding, with San Felipe de Neri Church anchoring the neighborhood and galleries, museums, restaurants and shops filling the blocks around it. The best version of a visit moves slowly: the plaza, the church, a museum stop and enough time to see the older city beneath the souvenir traffic.
Best for: Historic plazas and adobe Albuquerque
Sandia Peak Tramway
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Sandia Peak Tramway remains the easiest way to understand Albuquerque’s setting. The 2.7-mile aerial tram climbs from the city’s edge to the 10,378-foot crest of the Sandia Mountains, with desert, canyon and city views widening as the tram rises. At the top, the temperature drops, the trails begin and the city looks less like sprawl than a place built between mountain and mesa.
Best for: Mountain views above Albuquerque
Taos Pueblo
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Taos Pueblo adobe village is both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a National Historic Landmark, with more than a thousand years of tradition behind it and residents who still live within the Pueblo. Visitor hours and access can change for ceremonies, religious activities, and community needs, so checking ahead is part of visiting with respect.
Best for: Living Native history and adobe architecture
White Sands National Park
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White Sands National Park is the New Mexico landscape that feels least interested in blending in. The park protects a major portion of the world’s largest gypsum dunefield, where white dunes roll across the Tularosa Basin and make the desert look briefly arctic. Drive Dunes Drive, bring a sled, or time the visit for the ranger-led Sunset Stroll, when the sand picks up the evening light and the whole place turns quiet in a way that doesn’t need much help from a travel writer.
Best for: Surreal dunes and sunset wandering
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