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Albuquerque was founded in 1706 on a bend of the Rio Grande, and the Old Town plaza and San Felipe de Neri Church -- built that same year in thick adobe -- still anchor the western edge of the city the way the Sandia Mountains anchor the east. The Sandias turn a literal shade of watermelon pink at sunset, the source of their name, and the aerial tramway on the north side carries you from the desert floor at 1,500 meters to the granite summit at 3,255 meters in 15 minutes -- a ride that reveals how dramatically the landscape compresses in New Mexico.

Route 66 runs through Albuquerque as Central Avenue, and while most of the famous neon signs have dimmed, stretches of it remain intact enough to understand why the road felt mythic to postwar Americans headed west.

The Kimo Theatre, a 1927 cinema decorated in Pueblo Deco style -- combining Navajo motifs with Art Deco geometry -- is one of the genuinely singular buildings in the American Southwest. The Petroglyph National Monument on the city's west side preserves over 20,000 images carved by ancestral Pueblo peoples and early Spanish settlers into black volcanic rock.