Those of us who live here have a running joke. Santa Fe is the best-kept secret in the country, and we would quietly prefer it stay that way. So there is something funny about writing this at all. But the secret is out, and the accolades have become difficult to ignore.

In 2025, Travel and Leisure's World's Best Awards named Santa Fe the number one city in the United States. Not the best small city, not a hidden gem worth a weekend. The best city in America, full stop, ranked ahead of every larger and more famous name on the list. It was also the only United States city to place among the world's favorite cities. And that was only the headline.

If you have been quietly wondering whether Santa Fe is worth a closer look, here is the honest case, the awards and the life behind them, from someone who lives it every day.

The Year the Secret Got Out

The Travel and Leisure honor did not arrive alone. Conde Nast Traveler's 2025 Readers' Choice Awards named Santa Fe the best small city in the West, and the number two small city in the entire country for the third year running. In the magazine's United Kingdom edition, it landed among the top five cities in the world. Readers also voted it one of the country's best food cities, which will surprise no one who has eaten here.

The recognition goes deeper than a single strong year. Santa Fe has been a UNESCO Creative City since 2005, the first city in the United States ever to receive the designation, and 2025 marked the twentieth anniversary of that honor. MovieMaker named it the top small city in the country to live and work as a filmmaker. Years earlier, National Geographic gave it a World Legacy Award for sense of place, recognizing how fiercely this city protects what makes it itself.

Worth a note: awards like these tend to reward cities that photograph well for a weekend. What is unusual about Santa Fe is that the recognition is not about a skyline or a single attraction. It is about a way of living. And that is the part a ranking can only hint at.

Why the Awards Ring True

People do not fall for Santa Fe because of a list. They fall for the light, which does something here at altitude that photographers spend careers trying to catch. They fall for the adobe, the way a four-hundred-year-old city holds its shape while the rest of the country rebuilds itself every twenty years. They fall for the pace, which is slower without being sleepy, and for an arts and food culture that punches so far above the city's size it feels almost unfair. If you want the fuller picture of what daily life here actually costs and involves, my guides to the cost of living in Santa Fe and the honest pros and cons of living here are the place to start.

Art is not really a category here. It is the air. It is everywhere, literally everywhere: in the more than two hundred fifty galleries, in the studios, on the walls of the restaurants and hotels and private homes. Santa Fe is often called the third-largest art market in the United States, behind only New York and Los Angeles, which is remarkable for a city of around ninety thousand people. You do not visit the art here. You live inside it. The food follows the same pattern of scale defying size: a town this small has no business supporting hundreds of restaurants, and yet it does, which is part of why it keeps landing on best-food-city lists.

The history is not decoration either. This is the oldest capital city in the United States, and you feel it in the walls, in the acequias that still water gardens after four centuries, in a cultural calendar that shapes the year. I wrote about what it actually means to live inside that history in my guide to living in historic Santa Fe.

The Everyday Proof

The awards are lovely, but the real argument for Santa Fe lives in the ordinary week. Take the Santa Fe Farmers Market. USA Today and Sunset have both named it one of the best in the country, and it is one of the oldest and largest markets in the United States. What matters more if you live here is that it runs year-round, not as a summer novelty but as a genuine part of the rhythm of the week, at the Railyard on Saturdays through every season, with a smaller market added on Tuesdays in the warmer months.

Or take a smaller, truer example. My dog Taiga and I are regulars at the Frank S. Ortiz Dog Park, roughly one hundred thirty-eight acres of high-desert trails and open sky, often called the largest off-leash dog park in the country. That is the kind of thing you do not find in a ranking, and it is exactly the kind of thing that makes an ordinary Tuesday here feel like a gift. A world-class market and a vast open-space dog park in the same small city tells you more about the quality of life than any single trophy does.

The Honest Part

I will be honest about the mixed feelings. We joke that we wish nobody would move here, and there is a real tension in a place this special becoming this well known. But when someone asks me what it is truly like to live in Santa Fe, I tell them the same thing every time. I do not regret much in life, but I do wish I had moved here sooner. This city has given me a quality of life I did not know was available, for me and for my son. That is not a marketing line. It is the plain truth, and it is why the awards do not surprise me.

Here is the honest test. The people who belong here tend to know it fast. The opposite is true too. Santa Fe is not for everyone, and some people know within a year or two that it is not their fit. That is not a failure, it is simply the nature of a place with this much specific character. But the ones who belong feel it almost at once. They come for a long weekend, feel the light and the quiet settle something in them, and start doing the math on what it would take to stay. If that is you, the practical questions come next: where to land, what it costs, and how to make the move well. My complete guide to relocating to Santa Fe walks through all of it, and my roundup of the best neighborhoods for new residents is a good next step once the idea takes hold.