Getting the flavor of...The other Las Vegas

The other Las Vegas

Gamblers may prefer Nevada’s Las Vegas, said Gary Robertson in the Los Angeles Times. But New Mexico has a small city of the same name, and it’s perhaps the most authentic Wild West town you’ll ever visit. Once a hub for wagon trains and shoot-outs, this railroad-era boomtown looks like a living history museum, and a recent renaissance has established it “as one point of a vibrant artistic triangle that encompasses nearby Santa Fe and Taos.” On Main Street, we shopped at Popular Dry Goods, “a Western-wear store that caters to real cowboys,” and ate mouth-numbing green-chile stew at Estella’s Cafe, a place “so laid-back that you think the clocks have stopped.” The movie industry noticed this time warp long ago and made the town the backdrop for “scores of movies,” from Easy Rider to last year’s True Grit. Still, the award for Best Cinematography belongs to the “nearly perfect sunset” we drove off into on our way out of town.

California’s ghostly saloons

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

A tour of Southern California’s vintage saloons isn’t for skittish souls, said Matt Kettmann in Smithsonian. The 100 miles between Santa Barbara and San Miguel includes a good half dozen watering holes that date to stagecoach days, and local lore suggests they’re home to more ghost activity “than you can point your dowsing rods at.” Santa Barbara’s Cold Spring Tavern and Los Olivos’s Mattei’s Tavern were richer in atmosphere than shudders, and at Los Alamos’s 1880 Union Hotel, I was just “crossing my fingers for a sighting of Michael Jackson,” who filmed a video there. But Guadalupe’s Far West Tavern was another story. The bartender regaled us with tales of slamming doors and unexplained “gusts of air.” Skeptically, I brandished the divining rods we’d brought, then froze. Yikes, I thought, as they quivered. “Something about the situation felt curiously authentic, as if we’d tapped into another world.” Or maybe I’d just had one too many beers?