This New Mexico Gem Has Been Voted America's Best City For The First Time In History

What makes a great city? Is it epic scale and world-renowned cuisine? A thriving nightlife scene and art museums that just keep on giving? Maybe it's walkability, imposing architecture, and monuments that speak to a weighty sense of history? According to Travel + Leisure, which revealed its readers' choice World's Best Awards for 2025, a city's level of distinction is based on six broad criteria: sights and landmarks, culture, food, friendliness, shopping, and value. A total of 180,000 readers took part in the awards survey, revealing San Miguel de Allende in Mexico to be their favorite city this year, while cities across East and South Asia made up the guts of the top 10. Top of the American pile, and No. 19 globally overall, was a city of adobe-brick buildings and pueblo architecture that basks in the ethereal glow of the high-desert sun: Santa Fe.

New Mexico's capital city, sitting more than 7,000 feet above sea level in the northern Rio Grande Valley, was a first-time winner of the award. Charleston, North Carolina, had topped the podium for 12 years straight, so it took a city with real clout to knock it from its perch. And clout, not to mention stop-you-in-your-tracks beauty, Santa Fe has in abundance. It looks like the sort of city postcards were designed for, with its old-world cityscape, 300 days of annual sunshine, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains backdrop, and watercolor sunsets that marry with the architecture like cheese with fine wine. T+L readers highlighted these aesthetic virtues in their appraisals of Santa Fe, and also mentioned the innovative Mexican-inspired cuisine, art galleries, and markets as reasons to (re)visit America's oldest capital city.

New Mexico is one of the oldest corners of the U.S. — there's even a 1,000-year-old World Heritage Site around 70 miles to the north of Santa Fe — so history will play a role in your journey. The Native American Pueblo peoples inhabited this region before Spanish settlers first arrived in the 1500s. The Pueblo, coming from the Spanish word for "village," lived in houses of stone, mud, straw, and pine logs, and the settlers, clearly taken by the warmth and rustic beauty of the architecture, began constructing their own buildings in a Spanish Pueblo style. The rounded edges, earthy hues, shaded porches, and patios or courtyards of modern Santa Fe buildings speak to this historical melding of styles. Roughly 500 years later, Spanish Pueblo is still the most prominent architectural style in Santa Fe, and many of these buildings are now used as accommodations, such as the Inn and Spa at Loretto and the Inn of the Five Graces, an award-winning resort in Santa Fe's oldest neighborhood.

Santa Fe is also one of America's great art cities, with more than 200 galleries and over a dozen art museums. UNESCO designated it a Creative City in 2005, making Santa Fe the first in America to achieve such an accolade. Folk arts are part of the creative fabric of Santa Fe, where Indigenous crafts are still practiced and markets like the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market and the Traditional Spanish Colonial Market are popular events on the calendar. Also important is the Museum of International Folk Art, arguably the city's marquee museum. Many world-renowned artists have also been associated with Santa Fe, including Georgia O'Keefe, known for her color-rich and modernist landscape paintings of New Mexico. Her namesake museum in Santa Fe houses the largest collection of her work; it's not to be missed.