Smart Meetings

There’s a reason that the hoteliers I met in Santa Fe just kept moving around properties within the town, never choosing to leave.

It’s honoring what was then, in the streets and in the museums, in the architecture, in the dances and the haunting music played on pipes by an evening fire. But it also keeps moving forward with energy and spirit, creating new traditions and new frontiers in science. Whatever “it” is, I only scrape the surface.

The light here is very white and clean, its sharp clarity illuminated so memorably in Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings. She painted the light she actually saw outside her studio in this land of mesas and mountains.

Other things: in Santa Fe, the mountain air is scented with piñon and juniper. At 7,000 feet above the ocean—the same elevation as Lake Tahoe—the city is truly up in the mountains, with the sounds of the wind through the pine needles in harmony with such altitude.

It’s the undulating bronze satin ribbon of the Rio Grande—never far from either Albuquerque or Santa Fe—with its stands of feathery cottonwood trees. And the rounded elevations of the Sandia Mountains highlighted and shadowed in the fading afternoon light.

I’m in danger here of running headlong into my “1,000 words” limit, that one stunning photo by Ansel Adams captured better. Google Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico.

But if your group is seeking answers to strategic questions, needing calming days that promote different and fresh ways of thinking and acting, come here.

ALBUQUERQUE

THE PAST
At one point, the whole area was at the bottom of a vast sea. You can actually see the patterns etched into the chamois-colored earth when you look out of your plane on approach to Albuquerque International Sunport. Back then, it was a steamy place, and the sea’s shoreline was trampled by foraging dinosaurs. Only 190,000 years ago, volcanoes—whose cones you can still see cooling to the east—were firing chunks of New Mexico off as far as Idaho and Kansas.

Global freezing brought the glaciers which, thank heavens, melted after shaping the mountains you see around you. And then, finally, about 12 millennia ago, the first people arrived. After that, most of the area’s excitement came from the battles over the land among the various indigenous peoples themselves, and later between the 17th-century Spanish colonists and the Native Americans.

Ultimately both peoples made their resigned peace with the onslaught of settlers from the neighboring United States. They’re all still here in Albuquerque, both intermingled and also quite distinct.

In 2006 Albuquerque celebrated 300 years since its official founding, although the first Spanish homesteader set himself up near today’s Old Town 375 years ago.

Incidentally, about the fancy name: I love a story that starts with “There was this Spanish duke—although his name was spelled Alburquerque (somewhere along the trail the extra r fell out)—but I’m not finishing that story; you’ll have to hear it when you get here.

THE PRESENT
You’ll experience New Mexico’s heritage from the moment you arrive. The Albuquerque International Sunport looks for all the world like a great Native American pueblo, or village, with thick stucco walls and ceilings ornamented with beams called vigas, holding up rows of latillas or sticks. The cluster of hotels conveniently located adjacent to the airport is only a few minutes’ drive from downtown.

Downtown’s streets have outdoor cafes and nightspots with live music. In the Central Arts District, there’s a citywide First Friday. Strollers find galleries, artists’ studios, and restaurants, as well as shopping, along Fourth Street and Central Avenue (historic Route 66), in particular.

Musical taste in Albuquerque embraces Native Roots, a Native American reggae group and the New Mexico Symphony, now celebrating its 75th year. Joshua Bell will appear in late November.

If you want a downtown venue with theatrical exuberance, the KiMo Theatre has no peer. Set right on Central Avenue, this flamboyant Pueblo Deco, one-time moving picture palace opened in 1927.

Restored in 2000, and now a performing arts center, it can accommodate your group of up to 650.

Watch for the reopening of the historic La Posada hotel, built in 1939 by New Mexico native  Conrad Hilton. It’s now being preserved as a boutique hotel while aiming for LEED-certification.

Just completing refurbishment, the Albuquerque Convention Center has 168,000 sq. ft. of total exhibit space (106,200 clear-span), 29 meeting rooms, a 32,000-square-foot-ballroom and a 2,400-seat auditorium. ARAMARK is there to see to the dining needs of your group of up to 6,000. There are more than 900 convention-quality, or better, hotel rooms in walking distance. And within two miles, at most, are impressive museums and cultural centers, plus a multiblock, nationally honored historic district where the city began.

Old Town was settled in 1706. San Felipe de Neri church, on the charming park-like plaza that centers the area, includes the adobe walls of the chapel built that same year. Some 120 boutiques and art galleries operate in historic adobe buildings. Hollyhocks in lavender, fuchsia and white grow wild around here, their tall stocks looking glorious against the warm adobe brown.

Linda Brown, vice president, convention sales and services for the Albuquerque Convention & Visitors Bureau, knows the area well. “You can hold a reception in one of the charming, flower-filled gated patios here,” she says. “Some are surrounded by shops that will stay open for your evening event.” If you pick the right one, you might see a master jeweler at work, embedding turquoise, lapis, coral and shell inlay into gold.

Brown suggests that after the reception, your group can walk to the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History for dinner, still staying within the district. Among its handsome collection of regional works from the 1870s to 2000 is Georgia O’Keeffe’s gorgeous Grey Cross with Blue. Within the museum, there are multiple venues for receptions and dinners. The museum can accommodate groups from 16 up to 750 for the whole facility, indoors and out. There’s an amphitheater for 400, and the charming Back Sculpture Garden, but The Upper Deck takes full advantage of the museum’s dramatic contemporary architecture and offers views out over Old Town.

A selection of intimate restaurants in the old adobes entice smaller parties. Leave it to the wonderfully capable Albuquerque Convention & Visitors Bureau to help you decide on the very best setting in which to experience your first agave-wine margarita, sipped to the sounds of a trickling fountain. Linda Brown has a wonderful story to go with it.

Just north of Old Town is the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, housed within striking pueblo-inspired architecture. Go for the history of how the 19 local Pueblo peoples survived for centuries, unmoved from their ancestral lands. Go for the art works that bear the stamp of each Pueblo’s distinct aesthetic. And go for the fabulous store with not only a great selection of books, but especially of contemporary weaving, pottery and wonderful jewelry. There’s a restaurant and meeting rooms, but the new circular patio would be the perfect setting for a sundown reception with a demonstration through dance and music of a culture still very much a part of Albuquerque today.

The center also offers tours by bus of the Acoma Pueblo situated atop a mesa west of the city. It can be reached in a one-hour ride west of Albuquerque that’s part of the tour. Two-millennia-old, it’s said to be the oldest continuously inhabited community in North America. The pueblo’s new Sky City Cultural Center and Haaku Museum are standouts.

 

One mile south of Old Town is The National Hispanic Cultural Center, the only such institution in the nation. The fascinating permanent collection of contemporary works by artists from New Mexico, the United States, Mexico and Spain is vibrant, visceral, passionate and unforgettable.

Flamenco and folkloric dancing take place in the Center’s Plaza Mayor, where you can gather a group of 2,500. But the pride of the city is the handsome 2004 Roy E. Disney Center for Performing Arts that incorporates three different theater venues.

 

Not to be missed in Albuquerque is the delightful urban enclave just east of downtown known as Nob Hill. Developed in the 1920s, along Route 66, this is several-block-long district of repurposed buildings—old car dealerships which are now great little brew pubs and restaurants with patios. Gruet Steak House—owned by the honored local winery by the same name—is in an old fire station.

There’s fun shopping at the Nob Hill Business Center, including art galleries, a wonderful art paper store, boutiques of Southwest fashions, galleries selling fine local art and jewelry as well as home décor. Go to Nob Hill for Scalo’s live music on the weekends, or for the Zinc Wine Bar and Bistro, which both have live music through the week.

The red buses of the city’s Rapid Ride connect Old Town, Downtown and the Nob Hill area, in case your group likes to do their own thing after hours.

Incidentally, it’s nice outdoors most of the time. At 5,000 feet above sea level, Albuquerque’s high-desert climate offers low humidity and moderate temperatures, with average highs ranging from 50 degrees in winter to 90 in summer, and 70 in both spring and fall. Maybe that’s why there’s so much hiking and cycling going on (ask about the 16-mile Bosque Trail). It says something that, in March, Men’s Fitness magazine named Albuquerque The Fittest City in America. Further, the area’s Paa-Ko Ridge Golf Club was described by Golf Digest last year as providing “Golf at its absolute best.”

But most notably among outdoor activities, Albuquerque is a world-renowned center for ballooning. October’s annual Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta is the biggest gathering of the sport in the world. The event’s spiritual center is the spectacular, nearly 60,000-square-foot Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum, which overlooks Balloon Fiesta Park and the Sandia Mountains. Your group of up to 250 can dine indoors, and 500 attendees can stroll the galleries at a reception. Or, 1,000 can enjoy both the indoors and outdoors—all providing a taste of the magic any time of year.

Albuquerque not only has all this to do and see, but it is among the 15 cities in the country with the lowest per diem hotel, food and transportation cost for 2005 (Runzheimer International). The close-in airport means cab fare to downtown is under $20; car rentals are very reasonable, as well. The room tax, including the lodging and gross receipts tax (in lieu of sales tax), totals 12.875 percent. Yet, a group on a budget can have a premium experience in this growing, renovating and vibrant city.

You can still catch a glimpse of the Old West in Albuquerque, though. The downtown branch of the Rio Grande Credit Union—which shares a modern building with the CVB—has a sign posted on its glass-door entry that reads “Firearms prohibited.” Always good to know local customs.

IN BETWEEN: SANDIA AND TAMAYA

Two of the 19 Pueblos have developed extraordinary and very different destination resorts on their tribal lands immediately north of Greater Albuquerque’s limits. Both properties have sweeping vistas of the mountains and across the mesas. Both offer the latest in the expected high-end resort amenities of fine dining, spas, pools and golf courses. But they are dramatically and appealingly different.

Sandia Resort & Casino is vast, vibrant and impressive, and easily accessible both from Albuquerque’s airport 10 miles south and also from the main north-south highway. The balloon museum is only about two miles away.

The resort is situated on the Sandia Pueblo’s 22,877 acres, with a backdrop of the more than two-mile-high vertical slope of the Sandia Mountains. While the Sandia peoples, who can trace their lineage to the Aztecs, have occupied this site since 1350 AD, their resort rocks with an-almost Las Vegas vibe. It’s not only coming from the casino at the entry, but also from the hotel beyond. There’s a 5,000-seat amphitheater for the likes of Trisha Yearwood, the Doobie Brothers, the Steve Miller Band, Los Lonely Boys and the B-52s, who’ll all appear in the next few months.

The 12,000-square-foot Green Reed Spa has a multipage treatment menu, complete with full beauty and cosmetic services. Two years ago, the Sandia Golf Club—with a Scott Miller-designed 18-hole course set at the base of the mountains—was listed as one of the “Top New Courses You Can Play” by GOLF Magazine. The rooftop indoor-outdoor lounge and adjacent dining room offer beautiful views across the course, the pool and the tribal lands’ natural landscape.

To take in truly unforgettable views, however, you only have to go a little farther along Sandia’s roadway to ascend some 5,000 feet via the Sandia Peak Aerial Tramway. Some 275,000 passengers make this trip annually to the 10,400-foot-high-peak on the world’s longest aerial tram. At the top, the view out over 15,000 square miles can build up quite an appetite. A collection of mountaintop restaurants will take care of that. From mid-December through mid-March, it’s the gateway to the Sandia Peak Ski Area, and your group can take lessons, rent equipment and even ski their way back down.

Farther north, and about a 15-minute trip to the east off the main highway, is the second resort, the AAA Four-Diamond Hyatt Regency Tamaya. Here, too, the 700-person Santa Ana Pueblo has a past rooted to the banks of the Rio Grande, going back over a millennium. Their old village has been maintained at its current site about nine miles away for more than 800 years. The Crusades were taking place when the Tamayame settled here.

At the last part of your drive across the Santa Ana Pueblo, you turn into a narrow, undulating driveway, past the natural high desert native grasses and shrubbery. You’re entering a gentle valley of mesas and shallow canyons along the banks of the Rio Grande when you first see the golf links. But because the 350-room resort is so low to the ground, you don’t spot it until you are almost there.

Upon arrival, the welcoming entry courtyard—modeled after the centuries-old dance plaza at Tamaya village, sets the tone for the rest of your serene experience. The interiors are decorated with fine Southwestern antique furnishings, early 20th-century Navajo weavings and exquisite contemporary Pueblo pottery and regional paintings.

As native New Mexican Corrina Burns, who is Tamaya’s public relations/marketing manager, said to me over lunch at Tamaya, “Pueblo cultures look at time and space completely differently than we do. They’re in time with the earth and the seasons. That’s incorporated with what we do here. It’s very spiritual.”

The food is outstanding. Their unique “New Mex-Asian” cuisine includes offerings that incorporate local products like Tamaya Blue Cornmeal. The resort’s chef has been with Hyatt for more than 28 years. A lunch on the Grand Courtyard off the Santa Ana Café and dinner at the Corn Maiden reflected the culinary team’s skill.

There’s 21,650 of handsome indoor function space here. And currently finishing up construction is the dramatic new House of the Hummingbird, a 12,000-square-foot outdoor ballroom that replicates an old adobe Pueblo ruin. Your group can also be conveyed via horse and buggy to a reception and dinner at the 8,000-square-foot open-air pavilion set in the six-mile-long cottonwood bosque (or forest) on the Rio Grande.

There’s the Twin Warriors Golf Club championship golf course by Gary Panks, complete with a water exhibit and a greens layout that takes players among archeological sites that go back to the 1200s. There’s also guided horseback riding, three swimming pools, tennis, nature walks, s’mores by the fire, hot-air balloon rides, bicycle riding and family activities. Traditional tribal dance performances, bread-baking demonstrations and flute playing richly enhance the experience. Multiple fitness classes and the 16,000-square-foot spa invite self-nurturing. No wonder it takes up 500 acres of the 73,000 total! Las Vegas-style gaming is available at the Santa Ana Star Casino near the main highway.

From either of these two destinations, Santa Fe can be a daytrip, at about 45 minutes to the north, as can Albuquerque and its airport, a half hour’s drive to the south.

SANTA FE

THE PAST
In three years, Santa Fe will mark its quadcentennial. As New Mexico’s present-day seat of government, it is the oldest capital city in the United States. The Spanish established Santa Fe in 1610 as a military outpost, just three years after English settlers first began the Virginia Colony at Jamestown, and 22 years after the landing at Plymouth Rock. Up went the Palace of the Governors that same year, serving as the headquarters and housing for the first arrivals.

Actually, habitation in the community goes back further, according to Steve Lewis, who handles public relations for the Santa Fe Convention & Visitors Bureau. During excavation for the parking garage and foundation of the new Santa Fe Civic Center that’s going up right now, intriguing artifacts from the 11th century have surfaced.

The story of the Native American peoples’ history in this area mirrors that of Albuquerque. And likewise, influences of their culture have prevailed. The many Spanish contributions to the area’s daily life are also expressed here, in the art, in the architecture, in the cuisine and in the existence of the Plaza, Santa Fe’s heart. The streets and some buildings still carry the names of the founding families, many of whose descendents remain.

Upon Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, the neighboring United States was permitted to trade. And so the famed Santa Fe Trail was established from Independence, Mo. to the Plaza of Santa Fe. It was a lifeline until 1880, when it immediately fell to the competition of the Santa Fe Railroad, which had come into Albuquerque. “The city nearly went broke as a result,” says Alan Jordan of Access Santa Fe, whose intimate knowledge and affection for his adopted city has drawn a roster of clients including the American Bar Association, Calvin Klein, IBM, Southwest Airlines, the board of American Institute of Architects, the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Johns Hopkins, Pfizer and the U.S. Congress.

Santa Fe also benefited culturally from the arrival of another tremendous influence in the form of one single man, French-born Father Jean Baptiste Lamy, who arrived in 1851 as New Mexico’s first bishop, and later the first archbishop. (He was the model for Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop.)

Upon arrival, he quickly saw the necessity of establishing an orphanage, which is still caring for children; a proper school, which is still educating today; and a cathedral, St. Francis on the Plaza, which incorporates the original 1717 church, and where mass is still said today. He brought clippings of fruit trees that still grow in his garden on what was once his personal retreat and chapel about three miles from town. Today, you can walk among his gardens and stay at The Bishop’s Lodge Ranch Resort & Spa on his former property, where an inn has been operating since 1918.

By the 1920s, Santa Feans looked around at the legacy of some 50 years of Victorian homebuilding (replacing crumbling pueblos), and realized something was being lost in the process: Santa Feaness. Today, about 20 percent of Santa Fe is preserved in historic districts, but the whole city looks as if it were.
 
THE PRESENT
The city of Santa Fe is the attraction. It’s just a matter of knowing where to meet, to party and maybe even to achieve inner peace.

“It’s a city of nooks and crannies, of intimate spaces, of places that don’t give themselves up easily,” says Chris Madden, director of sales for the Santa Fe Convention & Visitors Bureau. Much is within easy walking distance. “There’s a real appreciation by people who live here, of what it brings to a harmonious way of living,” adds the Greenwich Village-raised Madden.

There are 70,000 residents of Santa Fe, yet it has eight major museums, an opera, a symphony, three choral groups, and always, of course, the art which uniquely blends Spanish, Pueblo and Anglo visions. Plus, half the galleries of the city are conveniently located along Canyon Road.

“The people who come here appreciate the culture,” says Madden. “The meeting of historic and new clash sometimes, but it’s a genuine experience!” Which, by the time you read this, may be enshrined as the city’s new tagline, she hints. Your group will have a genuine experience if you stage a team-building scavenger hunt in town, looking for plaques or the haunts of the well-known local ghosts.

Santa Fe has had groups as large as 1,200 to 1,500, and that’s been without a convention center. It doesn’t take more than 300 to 500 to do a citywide, spread over three to four hotels, according to Madden. But a 500-person meeting can be bundled into one hotel.

The big news in Santa Fe meetings is the construction of the new Santa Fe Civic Center. “It will allow us to present a building with state-of-the-art services that we couldn’t do before,” says Madden. The building’s columnless exhibit space, Sweeney Ballroom, totals 17,900 on the main floor. “The space is divisible into halves, thirds and even fifths for great flexibility,” she says. “It virtually doubles the space we had before.” Plus 11 meeting rooms on two levels contribute another 7,875 sq. ft. of space.

The Civic Center has also been designed with multiple plug-ins, three kitchens and three doors for 18-wheeler access. And yet, in spite of the state-of-the-art wiring and features, the past is in charge. The building is being laid out around a 4,000-square-foot tiled courtyard. This courtyard will have a Spanish-style tiered fountain. The corners on the heavily stuccoed walls will be rounded. It’s slated for ironwork balconies and beam ceiling supports. From the rendering, which you can see on page 30 of our March 2007 issue (if you’ve been saving back issues), it looks like a classic 1930s example of Spanish Pueblo architecture—a unique civic structure in the 21st century for a unique city.

The city currently has a contract with a consultant to determine contracts and pricing. It is being built as a community center, so the trade-offs of having softer pricing in return for more hotel revenue are being looked at. “In and of itself, it’s not a money-making entity. During the current pre-sell time, we’re asking hotels to look at their business again,” reports Madden. “We hope to see that, with enough hotel rooms, we’ll be able to give credit for free space at the civic center.”

The construction is comfortably on schedule for its opening in June 2008, with a move-in set for the following month and with first bookings for November. The CVB is currently selling the center through 2014.

The thick adobe walls and courtyard of the Palace of the Governors will transport your group back in time as they stroll with refreshments in hand, through the various galleries and recreated rooms devoted to New Mexico’s history. There’s a three-story addition to come at the Governor’s Palace, according to the CVB’s Lewis, that will open in early 2009. “It’s being done subtly,” he says. “It is a 400-year-old building, after all!”

Other top venues in town for memorable events include the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, which exhibits more than 800 of her works, including sculptures. There you can have a private tour of the galleries and a reception in the museum’s courtyard, with its high iron gates. Nearly 16-foot-high walls surround this intimate, brick-paved space with a single, large cast aluminum sculpture, signed GOK. Other museums in town that make great venues include The Museum of International Folk Art, The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and the Museum of Anthropology and The Museum of Fine Arts.

Alan Jordan, whose company also arranges events in town, advises, “You can do an event in a museum, in a gallery or a private home. Have dinner in an artist’s home where the caterer creates a Native American meal accompanied by a solo flute player, a Spanish guitar or a pipe. In a three-hour period, you can combine in the art, the food and the entertainment everything that is Santa Fe.”

Madden suggests that with so many tempting things to explore, a meeting planner needs to be creative when using the town as a destination. “Perhaps giving time off during the day,” she says, “maybe an extended lunch period.” She has other tips, too: Be flexible on your dates. “It’s just amazing how a shift by a day can apply a $40-per-person difference. And even with budget constraints, you can have a great meeting here,” she adds.“For my clients, I’m the Mother Wolf! I contact everyone and say ‘It’s Chris!’

We have a lot of passionate, plugged-in people in this town. Anything is possible.” Also, she says, people shouldn’t be afraid of high season. “It affords opportunities for executive board members to knock off at a Santa Fe Opera tailgate.” Further, don’t be afraid of short lead times, either. “Within seconds, we can connect your needs with all the hotels; within hours I can call back and say, ‘You need to these pursue contacts…’”

Go to Albuquerque first, for the first taste, for the introduction to the ancient, the historic and the modern Southwest; then go to Santa Fe, to experience a festive village that combines an intoxicating blend of history, music, art, beauty and spiritualism far beyond any town of its population size in the country. Now, aren’t you glad you know?   

 

NEWS

• Wyndham Albuquerque, built in 1996, begins a $6-million renovation in November, as part of its reflagging to a Sheraton. The lobby, restaurant, bar, all guestrooms and ballrooms will be redone, to be completed in March 2008.
• Parc Plaza/Carlisle in Albuquerque is currently closed for major renovation that will include an indoor waterpark; it’s to reopen later this summer.
• The Doubletree Hotel Albuquerque is finishing up a multimillion-dollar renovation, to be completed this summer. It is linked by an underground passageway directly with the Albuquerque Convention Center.
• Santa Fe Civic Center is on target for its completion date of June 2008. The Santa Fe Convention & Visitors Bureau is accepting bookings for November 2008 forward to 2014.
• Ski Santa Fe, 16 minutes from Santa Fe, has a new lift.
• Rail Runner Service is slated for mid-to-late 2008 from Albuquerque to Santa Fe’s south side. It’s expected to get a spur route that terminates at the Palace of the Governors in 2009.
• The Inn at Loretto was approved for an 8,000-square-foot ballroom. Groundbreaking is slated for 2008, along the addition of 23 luxury guest suites.
• At the Hilton Santa Fe/Historic Plaza, all hallways have been refurbished. Some guest rooms have refreshed carpet and bedding.

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Getting There

Albuquerque International Sunport has nonstop service from 39 cities on American, Continental, Delta, Frontier, Northwest, Southwest, US Airways, as well as ExpressJet, Shuttle America, Horizon Air, Mesa Airlines and Skywest Airlines. Taxis, rental cars, charter bus and limo service, two shuttle services into town (5 miles from the convention center), and two shuttles to Santa Fe (about 60 minutes). Back to Top

Not To Be Missed

For a Zen Retreat 

Capturing the spirituality of Santa Fe, Sunrise Springs Resort Spa is also inspired by the Far East. The 70-acre eco-resort, located a few minutes’ driving distance from the Plaza, offers meditation, Tai Chi, yoga and Raku pottery-making. The sanctuary features a Japanese tea house where the tranquil ritual of tea ceremony is honored.

 

A Little Taste of New Mexico

First of all, in case you were wondering, Sandia (as in Sandia Mountains) means watermelon in Spanish. It’s the rosy hue of that western range in the late afternoon sun.

Now that we have that out of the way, New Mexico’s foods are a mestizo, a mix. You can incorporate into your menu planning the sacred foods of the native peoples, the corn, mutton and squash that were first adopted by the Spanish colonists. These were joined by foods from Mexico.

Today pecans, goat cheese, dragon’s tongue beans, turban squash, neon eggplant, watermelon, purple potatoes, arrugula and heirloom tomatoes are cultivated or produced specialties in New Mexico―beyond the ever-present green chiles and red chiles, of course.

New Mexico is said to be the oldest winemaking region in the United States (nmwine.com) Vines were brought by the Spanish missionaries into the Rio Grande Valley in the 1600s. From today’s New Mexican vineyards have come award-winning cabernet franc, cabernet sauvignon, merlot, riesling and sparkling wines. One local winery makes a private label for the Waldorf=Astoria in New York.
 

The Sky Stone 

I used to save up my weekly allowance of four quarters so that I could buy turquoise embedded silver bracelets and rings, so much did I love the vibrant color. I had forgotten this decades-ago passion and long ago lost track of those forgotten treasures.

However, a visit to the Turquoise Museum (505-247-4001), on the edge of Albuquerque’s Old Town historic district, brought back a renewed appreciation for this lovely stone, which has been revered in ancient Egypt, Persia, China, Peru, Chile and Mexico. Happily, some of the highest quality sources are found in the Southwest.

Privately operated and looking like something straight from the 1950s, the museum exhibits an array of rough, as well as cut and polished stones—by their mine of origin. There is also important information about how easy this stone is to fake…the use of colored plastic is truly widespread. The truth is, only about 15-percent of all turquoise on the market is natural gemstone-grade. Much more of what you see is “enhanced,” “reconstituted,” “dyed,” or “oiled.”  As an example, “Stabilized” turquoise is infused with acrylic or plastic under pressure to make it usable. All this is fine, as long as it’s not passed off—and priced like—the real thing. The museum should be visited for education before purchasing any jewelry elsewhere.

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