The National Hispanic Cultural Center
Near Albuquerque, New Mexico
The National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque's historic Barelas neighborhood opened in two thousand, built on a site where Hispanic families had lived and worked since the seventeenth century. The center sits along the Rio Grande in the oldest continuously occupied Spanish colonial neighborhood in Albuquerque, and it was designed to honor the full sweep of Hispanic arts and culture across six centuries of history in the Americas. The centerpiece is the Torreón, a tower housing one of the largest fresco paintings in North America: a curved fresco of roughly four thousand square feet by New Mexican artist Frederico Vigil depicting the history of Hispanic civilization from ancient Iberia to the present.
The center hosts performing arts, visual arts exhibitions, genealogy resources, and one of the most important Spanish-language libraries in the United States. It is administered by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.
