TAOS, NEW MEXICO-AUGUST 13: Building materials sit outside an earthship being built in Taos on August 13, 2014. Earthships are environmentally friendly homes made of recycled materials.
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Earthships

Taos


Numbering 70 Earthships, with capacity for 60 more, Taos’ pioneering community was the brainchild of architect Michael Reynolds. Built with recycled materials such as used automobile tires and cans, and buried on three sides, Earthships heat and cool themselves, make their own electricity and catch their own water; dwellers grow their own food. Stay overnight if possible; the self-guided 'tour' is disappointing. The visitor center is 1.5 miles west of the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge on Hwy 64.


Lonely Planet's must-see attractions

Nearby Taos attractions

1. Rio Grande Gorge Bridge

1.69 MILES

Constructed in 1965, this vertigo-inducing steel bridge carries Hwy 64 across the Rio Grande about 12 miles northwest of Taos. It’s the seventh-highest…

2. Millicent Rogers Museum

9.49 MILES

Rooted in the private collection of model and oil heiress Millicent Rogers, who moved to Taos in 1947, this superb museum, 4 miles northwest of the Plaza,…

3. Martínez Hacienda

10.35 MILES

Set amid the fields 2 miles southwest of the Plaza, this fortified adobe homestead was built in 1804. It served as a trading post, first for merchants…

4. DH Lawrence Ranch & Memorial

10.57 MILES

In 1924, Mabel Dodge Luhan gave DH Lawrence's wife, Frieda, this 160-acre ranch, now administered by the University of New Mexico, where the Lawrence…

5. Harwood Museum of Art

11.54 MILES

Attractively displayed in a gorgeous and very spacious mid-19th-century adobe compound, the paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture and photographs here…

6. Blumenschein Home & Museum

11.59 MILES

Wonderfully preserved adobe residence, dating originally from 1797, which provides a vivid glimpse of life in Taos’ artistic community during the 1920s…

7. Kit Carson Home & Museum

11.73 MILES

A short walk east of the Plaza, the little-changed former home of Kit Carson (1809–68) – perhaps the Southwest's most famous mountain man, guide, trapper,…

8. Taos Art Museum at Fechin House

11.73 MILES

Russian artist Nicolai Fechin moved to Taos in 1926, aged 46, and adorned the interior of this adobe home with his own distinctly Russian woodcarvings…