Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe, New Mexico

The Palace of the Governors was built around 1610. It is an adobe structure on the central Plaza in Santa Fe. It served as the seat of government for the state of New Mexico for centuries, and is the oldest continuously occupied public building in the United States.

In 1598, Juan de Oñate was appointed the first governor of the new Province of New Mexico. The same year he founded the San Juan de los Caballeros colony, the first permanent European settlement in the future state of New Mexico, on the Rio Grande near Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo. Oñate extended El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, "Royal Road of the Interior," by 700 miles from Santa Bárbara, Chihuahua to his remote northern colony of New Mexico.

The settlement of Santa Fe was established at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the southernmost subrange of the Rocky Mountains, around 1608; and in 1610 Pedro de Peralta, the newly appointed governor of the Spanish territory began construction on the Palace of the Governors. The Palace changed hands as the territory of New Mexico did, with the Spanish thrown out in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the Spanish reconquest of New Mexico rom 1693 to 1694, Mexican independence from Spain in 1821, and finally US possession in 1848.

The Palace served as the seat of government of the enormous Spanish colony of Nuevo Mexico, which at one time comprised the present-day states of Texas, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, California, and New Mexico. After the Mexican War of Independence, the Mexican province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México was administered from the Palace of the Governors. When New Mexico was annexed as a U.S. territory, the Palace became New Mexico's first territorial capitol.

Amazingly Lew Wallace wrote the final parts of his book Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ in this building while serving as territorial governor in the late 1870s. He remembered later in life that it was at night, during a severe thunderstorm in the spring of 1879, after returning from a tense meeting with Billy the Kid in Lincoln County, when he wrote the climactic Crucifixion scenes of the novel. Wallace worked by the light of a shaded lamp in the shuttered governor's study, fearing a bullet from outside over the tensions surrounding the Lincoln County War.