Fiesta de Santa Fe

On Fiesta weekend the gazebo on the Santa Fe Plaza becomes a bandstand from morning until ten at night, and every performance on it is free. The program runs to Pueblo dances, Aztec dancers in feathers and gilt, Mexican folklorico troupes in costume, and the ritual drama of the Matachines. Northern New Mexico music and mariachi carry across the square, and the organizers note that revelers break into dance, form a conga line, or sing along. In September 2026 the Matachines de San Lorenzo de Bernalillo danced there with rattles and ceremonial dress, a devotional dance the Fiesta describes as practiced in New Mexico since 1692.

Around the gazebo, food booths stay open from nine in the morning to ten at night. The standing menu is chicharrón burritos, green chile cheeseburgers, fried bread with honey, corn on the cob, candy apples and cotton candy. The guide santafe.com adds pan dulce, aguas frescas and biscochitos, which it calls the state cookie of New Mexico. Craft booths line the Plaza on Labor Day weekend and again on Fiesta weekend, selling jewelry, pottery, leather, paintings, photography, woodwork and hand-blown glass, with the makers at their tables.

Ten days on the Plaza

The Fiesta spans two weekends. The 2026 Fiesta was the 314th. For the 315th, Santa Fe Fiesta, Inc. lists September 4 to 12, 2027. Santa fe.com gives September 3 to 12, counting the Burning of Zozobra at Fort Marcy Park on the 3rd. That site describes Zozobra as a 50-foot figure called Old Man Gloom, created by the artist Will Shuster in 1924. Before it is burned, people fill it with notes and shredded papers they call “glooms.” The Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe stages the burn and gives the proceeds to youth programs. The same guide places the Misa del Pregón, the Proclamation Mass, at 6 a.m. on the opening Friday. A procession through the Plaza follows to thank La Conquistadora, and then the mayor issues the proclamation that starts the week. The Mariachi Extravaganza is held at the Santa Fe Opera.

The official weekend opens at noon on Friday, when state, city and county dignitaries gather on the Plaza. The Fiesta’s notice for the opening calls the occasion the longest continuous community event of a European kind in the continental United States. It closes on Sunday at the gazebo, in a ceremony scheduled from 5:15 to 5:30 p.m. In 2026 the closing hour also brought the drawing of a 50/50 raffle, sold from the information booth on the Plaza. By mid-afternoon that pot stood at $1,500 and growing.

Pets on Saturday, floats on Sunday

Saturday morning belongs to the Desfile de los Niños, the children’s pet parade, which the Fiesta says has been a Santa Fe favorite for more than 100 years. Hundreds of children and costumed pets walk through downtown. They line up at 227 East Alameda Street, the former New Mexico School for the Arts and before that St. Francis School. The rules keep the parade small in scale:

• no horses, ponies, donkeys, llamas, goats or other large animals
• no motorized vehicles and no political entries
• adults may march only alongside a participating child

Prizes include Best Character and Best Message to Other Children.

Sunday afternoon brings the Desfile de la Gente, billed as the Historical/Hysterical Parade, with floats, show cars, riders on horseback and bicycles. Nothing may be thrown from a moving entry; candy has to be handed over. At the 2026 parade the judges named:

• Best Musical Group: the Raging Grannies
• Most Hysterical Entry: TLC Plumbing
• Best Historical Entry: the Tibetan Association of Santa Fe
• Best School Band Entry: the St. Michael’s Drumline

“These winners captured everything we love about Desfile de la Gente: creativity, laughter, history and an unmistakable love for Santa Fe,” said Eloisa Gonzales, president of Santa Fe Fiesta, Inc.

Novenas, a General and a Queen

The September weekend is the end of a year’s work by the Santa Fe Fiesta Council. The Council is a volunteer body of 100 regular members and 20 representatives of civic groups and businesses. Its president may also appoint a representative of the Native American community. Committees are assigned in January. In April the Council selects the year’s General Don Diego de Vargas and La Reina, the Fiesta queen. Members give hundreds of hours and, the Council says, sometimes their annual vacation. Nearly all of the budget comes from the craft and food booths, dances, carnivals, donations and grants.

The religious calendar starts in June:

• The first novena Mass, with the knighting of the General and the coronation of the Queen, at the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi.
• A procession to Rosario Chapel, followed by a week of novena Masses there.
• The ninth Mass, back at the Cathedral.

In August the Fiesta party visits parishes. In 2026 those visits included Cristo Rey, Santa Maria de la Paz, and Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe del Valle de Pojoaque. The Pregón de la Fiesta was held at Rosario Chapel and Cemetery on September 11, 2026.

The Council keeps rolls of its royalty. The list of Generals begins with Capt. Emory Moore in 1921, and the list of queens with Amalia Sena-Sanchez in 1927. The 2025 pair were JC Linson de Quintana and Kaitlyn Rose Medina y Lujan. The roll of Council presidents runs back to R. E. Twitchell, 1920 to 1922. The Fiesta also has its own song, with music by Billy Palau, Spanish lyrics by Johnny Valdes, Jr., and English lyrics by Avalee Turner. One line runs: “On this day we do not take la siesta / While Zozobra burns the gloom away.”

A wet September in 1712

The Council’s history begins with Santa Fe’s founding in 1610. In 1680, it states, the Indians revolted, burned the city and drove the Spanish colonists to Guadalupe del Paso, now Juárez. From the burning church the colonists rescued La Conquistadora, a 29-inch carved wooden figure of the Virgin. Fray Alonso de Benavides had brought it to Santa Fe in 1625. Twelve years after the revolt, the King of Spain sent Don Diego de Vargas to organize a resettlement, which the Council dates to September 4, 1692.

When de Vargas returned with more colonists in December 1693, he met resistance and camped outside the city, near the present site of Rosario Chapel. The colonists set La Conquistadora on a makeshift altar and prayed for her intercession. Before the month ended, de Vargas led his forces back into the city. He is said to have vowed to restore her throne in the parish church destroyed in 1680. He died on April 4, 1704, without doing so.

The city’s own minutes record what came next. They were translated by Fray Angelico Chavez in the New Mexico Historical Review in 1953. Rain had fallen since September 13, 1712, with lightning storms of a kind not seen before at that season, and the official meeting houses were unfit. On the 16th the City Council and citizens therefore met in the house of General Juan Paez Hurtado, the lieutenant governor. The governor, the Marquis of la Peñuela, had ordered him to preside.

The minutes give the 1692 entry as the fourteenth of September and note that in twenty years no fiesta had been kept. They bound the council and its successors to:

• celebrate that day with Vespers, Mass, sermon, and a procession through the Main Plaza
• pay twenty-five pesos to the preacher and thirty pesos for the Vespers, Mass and procession
• supply the beeswax

The fourteenth had already passed that year, so they chose the seventeenth, the feast of the wounds of St. Francis. Chavez concluded that “to all appearances” Paez Hurtado was the originator of the Fiesta. He added that no one knows how long the decree was observed.

The Council’s account agrees that Paez Hurtado, de Vargas’s captain and friend, moved the officials, and that the governor signed the proclamation. Santafe.com tells it differently, dating the Fiesta’s beginning to 1692, when it says de Vargas called for a thanksgiving.

La Conquistadora was crowned in 1954 by Cardinal Francis Spellman, and again in 1960 by an apostolic representative of Pope John XXIII. Her gold crown is set with stones, among them a three-carat diamond, and her wardrobe includes a lace mantilla from Sevilla.

A pageant, a gloom, and the end of the Entrada

The modern Fiesta grew out of a De Vargas Pageant staged with the Independence Day observances of July 4, 1911. According to Elizabeth DeHuff, members of the Santa Fe Club suggested it. The Rev. James Mythen, rector of Holy Faith Episcopal Church, pushed for it, and a Chamber of Commerce committee chaired by Arthur Seligman organized it. George Armijo played de Vargas in the pageant. In 1912 the pageant and Native dances were staged again, and a Hollywood company filmed them.

In 1919 the pageant was renamed the Fiesta and moved to September, with events on the region’s three cultures. Edgar Lee Hewett, who appears with a Fiesta group in a 1921 photograph, served as Council president from 1924 to 1926. Zozobra was first burned in public in 1926, and the first queen was crowned in 1927. The Caballeros de Vargas, a Catholic confraternity devoted to La Conquistadora, were refounded in 1956. One account dates La Conquistadora’s place in the Fiesta to 1958.

The Caballeros also staged the Entrada, a reenactment. In 1977 the All Indian Pueblo Council formally disapproved of it as an offensive display. Later protests were organized by Elena Ortiz of Ohkay Owingeh. One protester, Jennifer Marley, was arrested on charges that were afterward dropped. In 2018, after months of negotiations, the parties agreed to discontinue the dramatization. Those parties included the Caballeros, led by Thomas Baca-Gutierrez, and the Fiesta organization, led by Melissa Mascarenas. Regis Pecos was named their spokesman. Representatives of Mayor Alan Webber and Archbishop John C. Wester referred questions to him.

When the 314th Fiesta ended in September 2026, volunteers of Santa Fe Fiesta, Inc. took down the coats of arms and the other Plaza decorations and carried them back to the Fiesta warehouse.