Chaco Culture National Historical Park

UNESCO World Heritage Site (1987), National Historical Park And International Dark Sky Park; The Largest Pre Columbian Complex North Of Mexico · Nageezi, New Mexico

For about three hundred years from the mid-800s, a dry canyon in the San Juan Basin was the ceremonial and political centre of a world that stretched across the Four Corners. Chacoan builders raised great houses of coursed sandstone four and five storeys high, with thousands of rooms and enormous circular kivas, using timber hauled on foot from mountains fifty miles away. Pueblo Bonito alone had around 650 rooms. Roads thirty feet wide run dead straight out of the canyon for tens of miles, buildings are aligned on the solstices and the lunar standstill, and nobody has fully explained why any of it is here, in a place with poor water and worse soil. The masonry is the finest in the pre-Columbian Southwest and much of it is original, not rebuilt. Chaco is remote by design and by accident: the last twenty miles are dirt, there is no food, no fuel and no signal, and that isolation is exactly why the night sky over it is among the darkest left in the United States.

1808 County Road 7950, Nageezi, Nageezi, New Mexico, 87037, United States

The park road and the great houses are open daily from sunrise to sunset, year round. The visitor center keeps shorter hours and closes on major holidays. Night sky programmes run at the observatory on selected evenings in the warmer months only. The access roads are not maintained after dark and are not a place to be in the rain, so plan to arrive and leave in daylight unless you are camping.

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