Manhattan Project National Historical Park (Los Alamos)

National Historical Park Established 2015, Administered Jointly By The National Park Service And The Department Of Energy; The Los Alamos Unit Is One Of Three, With Hanford In Washington And Oak Ridge In Tennessee · Los Alamos, New Mexico

In 1943 the US Army took over a boys' school on a mesa in northern New Mexico because it was remote, defensible and had a road, and built Project Y there. Within two years several thousand people were living in a town that did not appear on any map, with a single post office box for an address, and the result was detonated at Trinity 200 miles south in July 1945. Los Alamos is still a laboratory town and that is the difficulty with visiting: the park was created in 2015 across three states, and a good part of the Los Alamos unit sits inside an active national laboratory behind a fence. What is open is genuinely worth the drive - Fuller Lodge and the Bathtub Row houses where Oppenheimer and the senior scientists lived, Ashley Pond at the centre of the old technical area, the Bradbury Science Museum and a small NPS visitor centre that is honest about what the place did, including the part of it that happened over Hiroshima and Nagasaki three weeks after Trinity.

475 20th Street, Los Alamos, Los Alamos, New Mexico, 87544, United States

The NPS visitor centre in downtown Los Alamos is open most days through daylight hours and closes on major holidays. The outdoor walking route past Fuller Lodge, Bathtub Row and Ashley Pond is open at all times and costs nothing. The Bradbury Science Museum, run by the laboratory, keeps its own hours. Sites inside Los Alamos National Laboratory, including the V Site and Gun Site buildings, are reachable only on occasional escorted tours that are announced in advance and fill immediately.

Manhattan Project National Historical Park (Los Alamos) on Spottos · Explore more places on Spottos