08/24/2026
This is a particularly nice time of year. Summer concerts are winding down, evenings are beginning to feel a little cooler, and Santa Fe is moving almost seamlessly from its summer arts season into Fiesta. Here’s what’s happening around Northern New Mexico over the next two weeks, August 24–September 7.
📍 LOS ALAMOS
🎶 Last Los Alamos Summer Concert of the season
Friday, August 28 | 6:30–9:30 PM
Ashley Pond Park | FREE
The summer concert series closes with Rapid Fire. Bring a chair or blanket, get something to eat, and enjoy one last Friday evening of live music at Ashley Pond. The concerts have become one of those simple Los Alamos summer traditions that are easy to take for granted until suddenly the season is over.
🐻 Bear Fest
Saturday, August 29 | 10 AM–2 PM
Los Alamos Nature Center | FREE
A festival devoted to something very relevant when you live in the Jemez Mountains: sharing our neighborhoods with black bears. Local and regional wildlife organizations will have exhibits and practical information about bear behavior and keeping both people and wildlife safe, along with games, crafts, food, and family activities.
It is fun, but also genuinely useful if you are new to living in Northern New Mexico.
🦸 Atomicon
Saturday, August 29 | 9 AM–5 PM
Mesa Public Library & Fuller Lodge | FREE
Los Alamos has its own comic and fandom convention. Expect costumes, crafts, games, vendors, writers and illustrators, plus workshops on subjects such as world-building and illustration.
This year also includes a talk with comic author Octavio Ramos Jr. and illustrator Paul Ziomek about creating and publishing Cuentos Infernales: Frightening Folklore from Latin America. A very appropriate event for a town with more than its fair share of scientists, engineers, readers, and science-fiction fans.
📍 SANTA FE: MUSIC & PERFORMANCE
🎭 Final week of the Santa Fe Opera
If you have been thinking about going all summer, this is the last week of the 2026 season.
August 25: The Magic Flute
August 26: Madama Butterfly
August 27: Lili Elbe
August 28: The Magic Flute
August 29: Madama Butterfly
Performances begin at 8 PM.
Even if you are not a devoted opera fan, an evening at the Santa Fe Opera is a very Santa Fe experience. The theater is open to the landscape, and the views of the Jemez Mountains and the sunset become part of the evening.
And there is a lovely Santa Fe tradition that makes it even better: opera tailgating.
People arrive early, open the trunks of their cars and set up dinner right in the parking lot. Some bring a simple picnic and a bottle of w**e. Others arrive with tablecloths, flowers, proper glasses, elaborate menus and decorations inspired by that evening’s opera.
The Opera itself calls parking-lot tailgating one of its time-honored traditions. The parking lots open three hours before the performance, and small tables and chairs can be set up beside your car.
There is something wonderfully Santa Fe about eating dinner and drinking a glass of w**e beside your car while the sun goes down over the mountains, then walking inside to hear Mozart or Puccini under the night sky.
🎵 Santa Fe Summer Scene, final concerts of the season
August 24 | 6 PM: Iguanas with Mineral Hill, Santa Fe Plaza
August 25 | 6 PM: Oh He Dead with Isaac Aragon & The Healing, Santa Fe Plaza
August 27 | 6 PM: Jay Boy Adams & Zenobia with Bill Hearne, Santa Fe Plaza
August 28 | 7 PM: St. Paul & The Broken Bones with Tré Burt, Railyard Plaza
August 31 | 6 PM: Mama Mañana Showcase, Santa Fe Plaza
September 1 | 6 PM: Neal Francis with Side Montero, Santa Fe Plaza
September 3 | 6 PM: Nuestra Musica with Gonzalo and Carlos Medina Conjunto, Santa Fe Plaza
All concerts are free.
Summer Scene brings local and national musicians to the Plaza, Railyard and other outdoor spaces around Santa Fe, with everything from rock and country to mariachi, folk and Native music. Bring a chair or blanket and make an evening of it.
I like these concerts partly because they make Santa Fe feel less like a tourist destination and more like a real community. On a summer evening, the Plaza becomes the town’s living room.
📍 SANTA FE: ART & GALLERIES
🎨 Friday, August 28: a very good night for gallery wandering
Several exhibitions open on the same evening. Instead of choosing just one, this might be a good night to head to Santa Fe around 5 PM and see where the evening takes you.
🖼️ Jesse Blanchard: Home Again
August 28 | 5–7 PM
Gallery at El Zaguán, 545 Canyon Road | FREE
Blanchard has lived in Santa Fe for more than twenty years, and this exhibition explores belonging and the idea of home through paintings of architecture, landscapes and changing seasons. His work connects memories of Vermont with his life in New Mexico, using the distinctive colors and light of Santa Fe.
🎨 Kathryn Stedham: West: Reimagined
August 28 | 5–7 PM
Blue Rain Gallery
Stedham has spent more than three decades painting the mountains, cliffs and canyons of Northern New Mexico. The new exhibition takes traditional Western landscape painting in a looser, more modern direction, with the landscape serving as a starting point rather than a literal record of place.
🌺 Poetry in Color: Jessamine Narita
August 28 | 5–8 PM
Brad Smith Gallery, 714 Canyon Road | FREE
Narita’s colorful contemporary paintings combine abstraction, flowers, landscape, texture and memory. The gallery describes each composition almost as a visual poem, which sounds particularly suited to an unhurried Canyon Road evening.
🎨 Kevin Tolman
August 28 | 5–7 PM
Nüart Gallery
A solo exhibition of new work by Santa Fe artist Kevin Tolman opens Friday evening and continues through September 19. Another easy stop to add if you are already making a gallery circuit.
Some evenings are better without a detailed itinerary. Start at one end of Canyon Road, walk, look through open doors, have a glass of w**e somewhere, and stop when something catches your eye.
🔥 THE BURNING OF ZOZOBRA
Friday, September 4
Fort Marcy Park, Santa Fe
If you have never seen Zozobra, this is one of New Mexico’s strangest and most memorable traditions.
The enormous marionette called Old Man Gloom represents the worries and troubles people would like to leave behind. People can actually write their “glooms” on paper and have them placed inside Zozobra. Then, after an evening of music and ceremony, the giant figure is set on fire while thousands of people cheer.
The tradition began in 1924. This year marks the 102nd Burning, with a special “Tyranny of Gloom vs. the Spirit of ’76” theme for America’s 250th anniversary. Gates open at 4 PM and the burn takes place after dark, weather permitting.
There is something oddly satisfying about the symbolism. We spend so much time accumulating memories, obligations and worries. Once a year Santa Fe says: write down one thing you are tired of carrying and let it burn.
🎉 FIESTA DE SANTA FE
Labor Day weekend brings the beginning of Santa Fe’s historic Fiesta celebrations.
🎨 Fiesta Fine Arts & Crafts Market
September 5–7 | 9 AM–5 PM
Santa Fe Plaza | FREE
Booths fill the historic Plaza with handmade jewelry, pottery, paintings, photography, clothing, leatherwork, glass and woodwork. Unlike simply browsing stores, the market gives you a chance to meet many of the artists and makers themselves and ask about how their work was created.
🎺 Mariachi Extravaganza de Santa Fe
Saturday, September 5 | 7:30 PM
Santa Fe Opera
Mariachi Herencia de Las Vegas brings trumpets, violins, soaring vocals and traditional and contemporary mariachi to the Santa Fe Opera.
The gates open at 5:30 PM for tailgating, so once again there is an opportunity to bring dinner and enjoy the sunset before the music begins. The combination of mariachi, the Opera setting and the mountains sounds like a particularly good Northern New Mexico evening.
📍 EL RANCHO DE LAS GOLONDRINAS
🌿 Sacred Medicine
August 25 | 5:30–6:30 PM
An introduction to curanderismo, the traditional healing practices that played an important role in rural and frontier life in New Mexico. The talk looks at traditions shaped over generations by Spanish, Mexican and Indigenous knowledge.
👩 Women’s History Tour
August 27 | 10:30 AM–12:30 PM
A guided walk through the Rancho’s historic buildings focusing on the women whose lives are often less visible in conventional history. The tour looks at their work, resilience, families and contributions to New Mexican life.
🐦 Early Bird Wednesday
September 2 | 7–10 AM
Leonora Curtin Wetland Preserve
The preserve opens early specifically for birders, giving visitors access during some of the best morning bird activity. Bring binoculars and comfortable shoes and enjoy one of the quieter sides of the Santa Fe area.
🏡 Josefina Tour
September 5 | 10:30 AM–12:30 PM
If you grew up with American Girl books, or have children who did, this is a fun connection between fiction and real New Mexico history. Josefina Montoya’s story was inspired by the culture and history represented at Las Golondrinas, and the tour uses the historic buildings and landscape to bring that world to life.
📍 TAOS & ANGEL FIRE
🎻 Music from Angel Fire: final concerts
August 25 | 6 PM: Horizons
August 26 | 6 PM: New World Dreams
Angel Fire Baptist Church
Music from Angel Fire is one of Northern New Mexico’s longstanding chamber music festivals, bringing accomplished musicians into the small mountain communities around Angel Fire and Taos.
Horizons explores the idea of musical discovery and pushing beyond inherited traditions, with music including Charles Ives, Mendelssohn and Mozart. The following evening closes the festival with New World Dreams.
It is an unusual combination: serious chamber music, a tiny mountain town, cool evening air and the Moreno Valley outside.
🎨 Taos Studio Tour
September 4–7
This may be one of the most interesting events in the whole roundup.
Rather than looking at art after it has arrived in a gallery, you drive the back roads around Taos and visit independent artists where they actually work. Studios are open 10 AM–5 PM Saturday through Monday, and the route takes you beyond the Plaza into parts of Taos you might otherwise never see.
Taos has attracted artists for generations, partly because of its landscape and extraordinary light. Seeing the studio, the surrounding mountains, the dusty road outside and then the finished work can make you understand the art differently.
