Mesa Verde National Park

Tucked into the sandstone alcoves of a high, canyon-cut tableland in southwestern Colorado are entire villages that Ancestral Pueblo farmers built more than seven centuries ago and then left behind. Mesa Verde – Spanish for "green table" – protects close to five thousand archaeological sites, around six hundred of them cliff dwellings, and it is often called the largest archaeological reserve in the United States. When Theodore Roosevelt signed it into existence on 29 June 1906, it became the first American national park created to safeguard the work of people rather than scenery, and in 1978 it joined the UNESCO World Heritage List.

People used the mesa for thousands of years before the famous houses appeared. Hunters passed through in the Archaic era, Basketmaker families later farmed corn on the mesa top and lived in pithouses, and from roughly 750 CE their descendants began grouping into above-ground pueblos with ceremonial chambers known as kivas. The spectacular phase came late: most cliff dwellings were raised between about 1180 and 1300, when households moved off the open mesa into the overhangs beneath it, close to seeping springs. Prolonged droughts and social upheaval followed, and by around 1300 the population had migrated south towards what is now Arizona and New Mexico, where Pueblo communities still trace their ancestry to these canyons.

Cliff Palace is the showpiece: a terraced complex of roughly 150 rooms and 23 kivas fitted into the largest alcove in the park, with square and round towers rising in front of a dark cave mouth. Spruce Tree House, Long House on Wetherill Mesa and the small but daring Balcony House, reached by ladders and a narrow crawl-through passage, show how builders adapted dressed sandstone, timber and mortar to every ledge. On the mesa top stands the D-shaped Sun Temple, thought by many researchers to have been laid out with solar and lunar alignments in mind, while Square Tower House, seen from the canyon rim, holds the tallest structure in the park. Elevations range from around 1,800 metres in the canyons to 2,613 metres at Park Point.

The outside world learned of the ruins in the 1880s. Local rancher Richard Wetherill and his companion Charlie Mason came upon Cliff Palace in December 1888, and in 1891 the young Swedish scientist Gustaf Nordenskiöld carried out the first methodical excavations, shipping many objects to Europe. Alarm at looting helped push Congress to protect the area, and the decades of stabilisation, excavation and wildfire-revealed discoveries since then have made Mesa Verde one of the best-studied ancient landscapes in North America.

Getting there

The park entrance lies on US Highway 160 between the small towns of Cortez and Mancos in Colorado; Cortez is the closest town of any size, and the larger city of Farmington, New Mexico, is about 64 km away. From the entrance a steep, winding road climbs about 34 km to the main cliff-dwelling area on Chapin Mesa. The nearest airport is Cortez Municipal Airport (CEZ), about 13 km from the park, with Durango–La Plata County Airport (DRO), beyond the town of Durango some 56 km or more to the east, as the main regional alternative. There is no passenger rail service; a car is the practical way to arrive and to move around the park.