2007 Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta
October 6–14, 2007
Every year in early October, hot air balloons of all shapes and sizes rise into the crisp fall air and fill the big blue New Mexico sky during the celebrated Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.




Arts Calendar

Did You Know?

Santa Fe, located at approximately 7,000 feet above sea level, is the highest capital city in the United States.

Santa Fe’s Palace of Governors, built in 1610, is the oldest government building in the United States.

Native Americans have been living in New Mexico for approximately 20,000 years. The Pueblo, Apache, Comanche, Navajo, and Ute peoples occupied the region when Spanish settlers arrived in the 1600s.

In 1950, the bear cub who grew up to be Smokey Bear was found in a tree when his home in New Mexico’s Lincoln National Forest was destroyed by fire. In 1963, in Smokey’s honor, the New Mexico legislature chose the black bear as the state’s official animal. Smokey is buried in Capitan, New Mexico.

New Mexico boasts more Ph.D.s per capita than any other state in the U.S.

New Mexico is populated by far more sheep and cattle than people.

New Mexico has a state question, “Red or Green?,” which is mainly asked in restaurants and refers to the choice of chile sauce a diner wants served with his or her meal. (If you want both, answer, "Christmas.")

Approximately seventy-five percent of the roads in New Mexico are unpaved.

While Lew Wallace served as territorial governor of New Mexico, he wrote the popular novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which was published in 1880 and was the basis for the 1959 movie starring Charlton Heston.

New Mexico's state constitution officially declares that New Mexico is a bilingual state. One-third of all families in the state speak Spanish at home.

In some isolated villages—Truchas, Chimayo, and Coyote—descendants of Spanish conquistadors still speak a form of 16th-century Spanish, spoken nowhere else in the world today.

New Mexico encompasses seven national forests, including the 3.3-million-acre Gila National Forest, the nation’s largest. Although many people picture New Mexico as desert terrain, a quarter of the state is forested.

New Mexico has the lowest water-to-land ratio in the United States— lakes and rivers make up only .002 percent of the state's total surface area. Most of the state’s lakes are actually man-made reservoirs.

The original territory of New Mexico, created by Congress in 1850, included all of New Mexico and Arizona plus parts of Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. The boundaries of present-day New Mexico were drawn by congress in 1863, and New Mexico became a state in 1912.

Santa Fe is the ending point of the 800-mile Santa Fe Trail, an international commercial highway used by Mexican and American traders in the early 1800s and later a national road leading to the southwest territories.