Three days in Santa Fe: adobe, altitude and the only question that matters is red or green

Take the first afternoon slowly, which the altitude will insist on anyway. Everything here is within three blocks.

The Plaza is the middle of it, laid out at the founding as a Spanish colonial square, the end of the Santa Fe Trail from Missouri, and still the place the town gathers. Sit on a bench under the trees for twenty minutes before you do anything else.

The Palace of the Governors runs along its north side and is the oldest continuously occupied public building in the United States, put up around 1610 as the seat of Spanish government and used as one for three centuries. It is a history museum now. Under the portal along the front, Pueblo and Navajo artists sell silver and pottery from blankets laid on the ground; the places are allocated by lottery each morning to registered makers, so what you buy is made by the person selling it.

Then the cathedral, two minutes east, which is the odd one out in this town: a French Romanesque basilica in honey-coloured stone, built between 1869 and 1886 by an archbishop from the Auvergne who thought adobe was primitive. The old adobe chapel he left standing at the back holds a wooden statue brought from Spain in 1626.

Dinner in the streets around the Plaza, and an early night, because you are not acclimatised yet.

Today is the art and the two churches, and it is another short walk.

Start at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, which holds the largest collection of her work anywhere. She came to New Mexico in 1929, moved permanently after her husband died, and spent the rest of her life painting the landscape north of here at Abiquiu. The museum is small, so an hour and a half does it, and it is much better than a single-artist museum usually is because the work and the country it came out of are half an hour apart.

Walk south to the Loretto Chapel, built in 1878 to a design copied from the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. The reason to go is the staircase: two full turns, no central column, no visible nails, built by a carpenter who is said to have arrived unannounced, worked in silence and left without payment. Engineers have explanations. The nuns preferred the other one.

Two minutes further on is San Miguel, a low adobe box thought to be the oldest church building in the country, with parts of the walls dating to around 1610 and a wooden reredos and bell that are nearly as old.

Then Canyon Road for the rest of the afternoon. Half a mile of adobe houses turned into a hundred or so galleries, from serious contemporary work to bronze coyotes, walked slowly with stops. On Friday evenings in summer they open late and pour wine.

The last morning is a mile and a half southeast, on a ridge with four museums, a sculpture garden and a view of the Sangre de Cristo mountains.

The Museum of International Folk Art is the one to make time for and the one nobody expects. Alexander Girard, a designer who spent decades collecting, gave the museum around 100,000 objects and then arranged a fraction of them himself into entire miniature villages, processions, markets and funerals filling a single vast room. Children stand at the glass for an hour. So do adults.

Next door, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture covers the Puebloan and Navajo cultures of the region properly, with a pottery collection that runs back a thousand years and a permanent exhibition put together with the communities themselves rather than about them.

Then Albuquerque, an hour south, for the flight home, or north into the mountains if you have longer.