Essence of Santa Fe From A Way Of Life To A Style

The Spanish Conquest As the conquistadores marched north up the Rio Grande Valley in 1598 at the head of a column of some 600 settlers and thousands of head of livestock they must have made a fearsome sight. Heavily armed with steel daggers, swords, and hareqbuses, and heavily armored from their steel helmets to their steel-capped stirrups, these strangers were about to alter forever the stable life that Pueblo Indians had enjoyed for centuries. No wonder then that in the Tewa language the word for "Spanish" is the same as that for "metal." After an initial settlement under the leadership of Don Juan de Onate failed near San Juan Pueblo, the Spanish founded the permanent capital in 1610 in what is present-day Santa Fe. The community was laid out in accordance with the Law of the Indies, a set of town planning principles issued by Spanish King Phillip II in 1573. These decrees accompanied all expeditions to the New World and dictated the location, layout, form, and settlement pattern of all new colonial cities. The resulting La Villa Real de Santa Fe de San Francisco de Assis may lack the colonial grandeur of a Lima, Peru, or La Paz, Bolivia. But generations of visitors to Santa Fe have nevertheless been struck by her beautiful setting high on a desert plateau at the base of a majestic mountain range..Scholz, Peter is the author of 'Essence of Santa Fe From A Way Of Life To A Style', published 2005 under ISBN 9781586854065 and ISBN 1586854062.