New Mexico’s Palace of the Governors

Highlights from the Collections

The Palace of the Governors, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960, was originally constructed in the early seventeenth century as Spain’s seat of government at the terminus of El Camino Real (the Royal Road) that connected Mexico City with Spain’s northernmost colony in the New World. Continuously inhabited for four hundred years, the Palace of the Governors—encompassing the Photo Archives, Fray Angélico Chávez Library, and Palace Press—is today part of the New Mexico History Museum. This beautiful book is the first to present selections from the Palace of the Governors’ vast museum collections including Spanish Colonial paintings, classic photography to contemporary prints, eighteenth-century retablos and bultos, turn-of-the-century clothing, and rare books and maps that tell the complex history of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the region. Among the Palace’s masterpieces: photographs by Ben Wittick and William Henry Jackson, the Segesser hide paintings, Bernardo Miera y Pacheco’s eighteenth-century retablo Santa Barbara, and Gustave Baumann’s printing press.