Walk the Santa Fe Plaza With a Former City Historian
Five stops around the Plaza with Ana Pacheco, listed by the city among its past City Historians.
Ana Pacheco appears on the City of Santa Fe's own roster of past City Historians, a post the city describes as ceremonial and educational. Before that she spent six years writing a weekly column called A Wonderful Life for the local paper, recording the oral histories of the city's elders. She founded La Herencia, a quarterly journal of Hispanic culture, and published it from 1994 through 2009.
This walk is that archive read out loud on a sidewalk. Six places sit on her route and five of them are stops; the state capitol is listed as a pass-by. The cathedral, the Palace of the Governors and Loretto Chapel get ten minutes each, and the remaining two get five. She also carries a binder of old photographs and holds them up against whatever you are standing in front of. Travellers keep mentioning that binder. "I was impressed with her extensive notebook of pictures which brought to life her stories," one wrote in January 2025.
The route stays inside the old town. It begins in front of the Basilica Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi on Cathedral Place, crosses to the Palace of the Governors on the north side of the Plaza, drops south to Loretto Chapel, and finishes west of the Plaza in Burro Alley.
The ticket covers the guide and nothing else. No stop on this route includes admission. A traveller put the rule plainly in August 2025: "Note that entry into churches is not included." Anyone who wants to stand under the Loretto staircase or walk through the Palace museum pays for that separately, before the walk or after it.
Santa Fe RevisitedAna Pacheco · 135 minutes · Wednesday to Sunday, 10:00 AM · rated 4.97 from 474 reviewswww.viator.comThe Long Adobe on the Plaza's North Side
The Palace of the Governors holds the entire north side of the Plaza behind a covered portal of squared timber. Her stop notes call it the oldest government building in the country, and she uses it to open the history of New Mexico's nineteen Pueblos. Ten minutes is a long time to stand in one place on a walking tour, and this is one of the three stops that get it.
Native artisans lay out silver and pottery on blankets along that portal wall. The building being described to you is a working marketplace while you stand there listening.
The Staircase You Will Hear About From Outside
Her longest story belongs to Loretto Chapel, two blocks south. Her notes put the chapel at 1878, built by Archbishop Lamy for the Loretto academy beside it, and date the spiral staircase inside to somewhere between 1877 and 1881. The thing that made it famous is that it appeared to climb with no visible means of support. She also notes the chapel was deconsecrated in 1968 and runs today as a privately owned museum.
Those ten minutes happen on the outside of the door. The chapel sets its own admission and keeps it separate from any tour. A traveller was blunt about the arrangement in December 2025: "if you want to go inside these landmarks you need to go before or after this tour."
The Doorway the Manhattan Project Used
109 East Palace is a narrow opening off the Plaza's north-east corner, easy to walk past without noticing. Her notes describe it as the military checkpoint for the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. The stop runs five minutes.
Of everything on the route, this is the piece travellers quote back. One summed the whole walk up in April 2026 as "a superb and complete history of Santa Fe from early Spanish settlers to Manhattan Project."
Burro Alley, Where the Firewood Stopped
The walk ends in a short lane between Palace Avenue and San Francisco Street. Her notes explain the name. Through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, vendors hauling salt from the Galisteo Salt Basin and firewood down from the mountains tied their burros here to rest, then went to the saloons and gambling halls nearby. One of those halls belonged to María Gertrudis Barceló, known as Doña Tules, and stood at the Palace Avenue corner.
A metal burro stands in the lane now, loaded with cut wood. Five minutes after arriving, the walk is over.
Departures run Wednesday through Sunday at 10:00 AM. The booking calendar carries no Monday or Tuesday slots at all. Ana Pacheco meets the group in front of the Basilica Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi at 131 Cathedral Place, one block east of the Plaza. Booking closes three hours ahead of departure, and a full refund needs twenty-four hours' notice.
The group tops out at ten travellers and the guiding is in English. The listing marks the route as wheelchair accessible and suitable for all fitness levels. Shade matters on this one: a traveller noted in October 2023 that Ana "did a good job stopping at places where her group could sit in the shade," and another described her steering the group toward "sheltered and sunny spots" on a cold, windy day. Leave the afternoon free for going back inside the places you only heard about.