Santa Fe Plaza

The Santa Fe Plaza centers on a dusty, rectangular park shaded by tall elm trees and punctuated by a central stone gazebo. Established in sixteen ten as the terminus of the Camino Real, this patch of earth served as the military and social heart of a Spanish colonial outpost. In eighteen forty-six, General Stephen Watts Kearny climbed onto a roof nearby to declare New Mexico a territory of the United States, replacing the Mexican flag with the American one without firing a single shot.