Santa Fe is just another urban shopping mall with a southwest flavour, yet it is worth a visit. A victim of its original attraction, it is now a large city sporting urban sprawl, motorways, traffic, and pollution—the usual result of human activity. Visitors from other American cities will feel quite at home in the shopping districts where national brand stores exert the powerful homogenizing effect that tends to make everywhere the same as everywhere else.

Urban rot took strong hold when the La Fonda Hotel got planning permission to build a multi-story hostelry on the main square, contravening an existing ordinance prohibiting structures higher than two stories. Once the La Fonda was built it overshadowed the church that had until then stood guard over the old town for the last couple of centuries. Now hoards of tourists swarm from the hotel spreading out through the narrow streets to forage for stuff and nonsense in the glass and chrome emporia behind adobe facades.

Santa Fe does host good chamber music, opera, arts-n-farts, and other results of Western Civilization. It is home to the rich and famous. Real estate is expensive. Depth of decline of Santa Fe was fathomed by the brace of ‘bed-wetting English types’ in the Chili Store, mispronouncing fajita to the confusion of the shop assistant; they pulled out a mobile phone to find out exactly which kind of packaged fajita mix was required at home in Lincolnshire.

Yes, Santa Fe is worth a very short visit. It has all the attributes of the Imperial Culture.