Mesa Verde: The World Heritage Site an Hour from Town
Near Durango, Colorado
About fifty miles northwest of Durango, the Mesa Verde plateau rises above the surrounding canyon country, its sandstone cliffs sheltering the remains of a civilization that flourished more than seven hundred years ago. Mesa Verde National Park was established by President Theodore Roosevelt in nineteen oh six, making it one of the earliest national parks in the United States and the first park created specifically to protect an archaeological site rather than a natural landscape. It preserves more than five thousand archaeological sites, including the cliff dwellings that have made it famous worldwide.
Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in North America, contains approximately one hundred fifty rooms and was home to perhaps a hundred people at its peak around the year twelve hundred of the common era. The Ancestral Puebloans who built Cliff Palace and the hundreds of other structures on the mesa had lived here for more than seven hundred years before departing around thirteen hundred. Their descendants are the Hopi, Zuni, and Rio Grande Pueblo peoples of today.
In nineteen seventy eight, Mesa Verde became the only site in Colorado to be inscribed as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, recognized as a place of universal significance to human civilization. Durango serves as the primary overnight base for most visitors to the park. Its hotels, restaurants, and the narrow gauge railroad depot make it the practical headquarters for exploring the broader Four Corners archaeological landscape that extends from Mesa Verde in all directions.
