Looking for detailed information about the Taos area?
Taos is a small community located in north-central New Mexico. It is about 70 miles north of Santa Fe, 130 miles north of Albuquerque, and about 45 miles south of the New Mexico / Colorado border.
The Taos area enjoys wide open panoramic views of the expansive mesa and towering majestic mountains surrounding the Taos valley. While located in the southwestern United States, the weather and climate are mild and semi-arid or high-desert in nature.
Taos is part of the Enchanted Circle, which includes the approximate 85 mile route from Taos east on Highway 64 through Angel Fire and up to Eagle Nest, then north on Highway 38 through Red River and then west on to Questa, and returning south on Highway 522 to Taos for the counter-clockwise route, or reversed for the clockwise route. Driving around the Enchanted Circle, you will enjoy a wide variety of scenery and vistas, including narrow canyon passages, winding mountain trails, expansive valley pasture land, forest covered mountains, and open sagebrush mesas. You will want to plan sufficient time to stop and explore the communities along the route; Angel Fire with its country club, golf course, ski area, and private Monte Verde Lake; Eagle Nest with its quaint store-lined street and recreational Eagle Nest Lake; Red River with its expansive main street stores, adventure activities like horse-back riding and jeep mountain tours, and its winter skiing; the cozy and remote residential area of Questa with access to the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument wilderness area as well as trails down into the Rio Grande River Gorge in the Rio Grande Wild Rivers Area recreational area; and of course, Taos with its historic plaza, the Taos Pueblo, the Rio Grande River Gorge Bridge, the ski slopes at Taos Ski Valley, and numerous art galleries and eating establishments.
Taos Area Home Styles
Housing in the Taos area is highly eclectic with a blend of old historical adobe structures to modern adobe and frame structures, and a lot of variety in styles and features.
Taos is also widely known for its local ventures into alternative ecological building methods, such as using insulative concrete, like pumice-Crete and rastra block techniques and materials, as well as using straw bale, rammed earth, and other alternative building materials.
And Taos is well known for its unique earthship biotecture home community known as the Greater World community just west of Taos a little past the famous Rio Grande Gorge Bridge on Highway 64. Also in this area and along Highway 64 up to the Tres Piedras area are hippy-ish off-grid communities where truly hardy environmentally and off-worldly individuals etch out a living with minimalistic needs and expectations. This is just another aspect of the widely diverse makeup of the local cultural and individual preferences that make Taos a truly unique and interesting place to live.