The Most Beautiful Places in New Mexico
11 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in New Mexico are Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, White Sands National Park and Shiprock. The list covers 11 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
New Mexico is high desert under a vast sky: the Rio Grande valley, lava fields and volcanic plugs, the edge of the Colorado Plateau in the north-west and the Chihuahuan Desert in the south. Its beauty is as much cultural as geological. Pueblo peoples have lived here for more than a thousand years, Spanish colonists arrived in the sixteenth century, and the adobe villages, missions and ruins of both still stand in the landscape that drew Georgia O'Keeffe.
Taos Pueblo is a multi-storey adobe town lived in for around a thousand years, and Acoma, the Sky City, sits on top of a sheer-sided mesa. In Chaco Canyon, Pueblo Bonito was the greatest of the ancient great houses, a D-shaped complex of hundreds of rooms and kivas. The adobe mission church of San Francisco de AsÃs at Ranchos de Taos, with its massive buttresses, became one of the most painted and photographed buildings in America.
The land itself is just as strange. White Sands is the world's largest gypsum dune field, gleaming white against the San Andres Mountains. Shiprock, a volcanic neck sacred to the Navajo, rises alone from the plain, and the cone-shaped hoodoos of Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks and the eroded badlands of Bisti show how wind and water shape soft rock. Underground lie Carlsbad Cavern and its Big Room and the deep, crystal-lined Lechuguilla Cave, while on the Plains of San Agustin the radio dishes of the Very Large Array line up across the grassland.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array | Radio telescope | |
| 2 | White Sands National Park | Dune | |
| 3 | Shiprock | Rock formation | |
| 4 | Taos Pueblo | Most beautiful village | |
| 5 | Pueblo Bonito | Archaeological site | |
| 6 | Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument | Rock formation | |
| 7 | Pueblo of Acoma | Most beautiful village | |
| 8 | Lechuguilla Cave | Cave | |
| 9 | San Francisco de Asis Mission Church | Church building | |
| 10 | Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness | Rock formation | |
| 11 | Carlsbad Cavern | Cave |
01 Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array
United States34.079° N 107.618° W
The Modern Polymath · CC BY-SA 4.0 Twenty-seven white dish antennas, each 25 metres across, stand in a vast Y shape on the Plains of San Agustin, a high, flat basin in western New Mexico. Together they form the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), one of the most productive radio observatories ever built.
Did you know? There are actually 28 antennas on site: one is always rotated out for maintenance while the other 27 observe.
02 White Sands National Park
United States · 23.9 km from Alamogordo32.780° N 106.172° W
apasciuto · CC BY 2.0 In the Tularosa Basin of southern New Mexico lies the largest gypsum dune field on Earth, a white sea of roughly 275 square miles, and White Sands National Park protects about 42 per cent of it.
Did you know? A 67-mile (108 km) fence was built around the park in 1996 to keep out African oryx roaming the surrounding basin.
03 Shiprock
United States36.688° N 108.836° W
Image by Christiane1956 from Pixabay Shiprock rises almost 1,600 feet (about 480 m) straight out of the flat high desert of northwestern New Mexico, a jagged dark tower alone on the plain. Its summit stands at 7,177 feet (2,188 m) above sea level.
Did you know? Captain J. F. McComb named the topmost pinnacle The Needle in 1860, before the ship comparison took over on maps in the 1870s.
04 Taos Pueblo
United States36.439° N 105.542° W
John Phelan · CC BY-SA 3.0 Taos Pueblo is a living town of earth: two great multi-storey blocks of adobe, stepped back in terraces up to five or six levels high, face each other across a stream at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Did you know? The multi-storey north house is the largest such pueblo structure still standing and is said to be one of the most photographed and painted buildings in North America.
05 Pueblo Bonito
United States36.061° N 107.962° W
See below · Public domain At the bottom of Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, a D-shaped mass of masonry rises in tiers against the cliff: Pueblo Bonito, the largest of the great houses built by the Ancestral Puebloans.
Did you know? Traces of cacao found in 2009 had travelled at least 1,200 miles and were the first proof of cacao in the present-day US before the Spanish.
06 Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument
United States · 26.5 km from Los Alamos35.674° N 106.419° W
Marshallhenrie · CC BY-SA 4.0 Cones of pale volcanic rock, some no taller than a person and others up to about 90 feet high, crowd the slopes of a small canyon on the Pajarito Plateau of northern New Mexico. Many still balance a cap of harder stone on their tips.
Did you know? Francisco Vásquez de Coronado recorded Cochiti Pueblo in 1540, and its people later took part in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 that drove out Spanish settlers.
07 Pueblo of Acoma
United States34.897° N 107.582° W
Scott Catron · CC BY-SA 2.0 Acoma Pueblo sits on top of a sheer sandstone mesa that rises roughly 365 feet (about 110 m) out of the desert valley of western New Mexico, and from below its houses look almost like an extension of the rock itself. The Acoma people call the place Haak'u, and the village on the summit is widely known as Sky City.
Did you know? San Esteban del Rey is considered the oldest surviving European-built church in New Mexico.
08 Lechuguilla Cave
United States · 36.3 km from Carlsbad32.191° N 104.503° W
Dave Bunnell / Under Earth Images · CC BY-SA 2.5 For most of the twentieth century, Lechuguilla was written off as a minor cave: a modest passage that miners worked briefly around 1914 for bat guano to sell as fertilizer, then abandoned once it stopped paying.
Did you know? Cavers heard wind roaring up through the rubble floor in the 1950s, but digging was only permitted in 1984; the breakthrough came on 25 May 1986.
09 San Francisco de Asis Mission Church
United States36.359° N 105.608° W
Liveon001 © Travis K. Witt · CC BY-SA 3.0 Seen from behind, the church of San Francisco de AsÃs in Ranchos de Taos is a sculpture in earth: massive adobe buttresses swell out from the apse and transepts in soft, rounded forms that catch the high New Mexico light. This view has attracted artists for a century.
Did you know? Its roof beams, or vigas, sit on doubled corbels and are spaced more closely than in most Spanish colonial churches.
10 Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness
United States36.304° N 108.118° W
John Fowler from Placitas, NM, USA · CC BY 2.0 The Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness is a maze of grey, white, brown and black badlands in north-western New Mexico, where mushroom-shaped hoodoos, eroded mounds and sandstone caps stand over a barren landscape of shale and coal.
Did you know? The ceratopsian Bisticeratops, one of the horned dinosaurs that lived here, takes its name from the Bisti badlands.
11 Carlsbad Cavern
United States · 33.6 km from Carlsbad32.177° N 104.441° W
Image by Christopher_OToole_Images from Pixabay Carlsbad Cavern, in the Guadalupe Mountains of south-eastern New Mexico, is one of the great show caves of the world, and its centrepiece, the Big Room, is the largest single cave chamber by volume in North America.
Did you know? Jim White's lantern went out in the Queen's Chamber during his early explorations, leaving him in total darkness for more than half an hour.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in New Mexico?
- On our list, Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array ranks first, followed by White Sands National Park and Shiprock.
- Why is White Sands white?
- The dunes are made of gypsum rather than quartz sand. Gypsum dissolved from the surrounding mountains collects in a basin with no outlet, crystallises as the water evaporates and is broken down and blown into dunes by the wind.
- What is the Very Large Array used for?
- The Very Large Array is a radio telescope of 27 movable dishes that work together as one instrument. Astronomers use it to study black holes, galaxies, star formation and other sources of radio waves.
- How old is Taos Pueblo?
- Taos Pueblo's main buildings are believed to have been built between about 1000 and 1450 AD, and the community has lived there continuously since. It is a World Heritage site and a living Native American community.
- What kinds of places are there to see in New Mexico?
- In our collection, the places in New Mexico are most often rock formations (3), caves (2), villages (2) and dunes (1).
- How many places are on this list in New Mexico?
- The list covers 11 places.