Palace of the Governors at New Mexico History Museum

The Palace of the Governors stretches along the north side of the Santa Fe Plaza, defined by a long, portal-style wooden porch held up by simple, square posts. Spanish colonists built this low-slung adobe structure in sixteen ten to serve as the seat of government for the province of New Mexico. It remained the center of administrative power through Spanish, Mexican, and American rule. Governor Lew Wallace even wrote portions of his novel Ben-Hur in these rooms while navigating regional unrest in the eighteen seventies.