UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
NEW MEXICO
Santa Fe County

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Santa Fe is situated at an elevation of 6,996 ft (2,132 m) in Santa Fe County in New Mexico. Santa Fe is the capital of New Mexico and has a population of around 62,200 (2000).

A settlement on the site that would become Santa Fe was first established by in 1607. The town was formally founded and made a capital in 1610, making it the oldest capital city and the second oldest surviving city founded by the European colonists in what land was later to become part of the United States, behind St. Augustine, Florida (1565). (Jamestown, VA, was also settled in 1607.) Santa Fe was the capital of Nuevo México, a province of New Spain explored by Coronado and established in 1598. The full name given to the new city was La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís ('The Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi'). Except for the years 1680–1692, when the native Pueblo people drove the Spaniards out of the area, Santa Fe remained Spain's provincial seat until 1810, with the outbreak of the Mexican War of Independence. In 1824, the city's status as the capital of the Mexican territory of Santa Fe de Nuevo México was formalized. In 1848 New Mexico was seized by the United States from Mexico, and in 1912 New Mexico became that country's 47th state, with Santa Fe as its capital.

The chapel of San Miguel [left] is the oldest church in Santa Fe. San Miguel was originally built in 1610/1626, although nothing of that building remains. The original building was razed in 1640 and rebuilt by 1680, when it was again partially destroyed during the Pueblo Revolt of the same year. The chapel's sculpture of San Miguel, the church's patron, was carved in Mexico in 1709. In 1710, the present building on the site was erected and has had significant modifications over the last three centuries. In 1859, the archbishop and the Christian Brothers of Santa Fe bought the chapel, and it became a part of Saint Michael's College. The picture on glass no. 1279 show the appearance of the chapel between 1872, when a severe storm caused the collapse of the upper two sections of the tower, and 1888, when the chapel was restored with the addition of two stone buttresses on each side of the front.

[Texts adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe,_New_Mexico, http://santafe.org/Visiting_Santa_Fe/Entertainment/Historic_Sites/index.html, http://www.cstones.org/projects / Santa_Fe/, http://southwest.library.arizona.edu/spmc/body.1_div.7.html]