Although you’ll see plenty of scenic desert vistas during Mesa Verde National Park tours, the park’s primary attractions are historical in nature. Mesa Verde is home to over 5,000 archaeological sites, mostly left behind by the Ancestral Pueblo people, who occupied the area for centuries before mysteriously disappearing in the 13th century.
Those sites include about 600 cliff dwellings, complex structures built in natural alcoves carved into the side of limestone cliffs. These dwellings range in size from single-room storage lockers to massive villages with well over 100 rooms. One Mesa Verde village, the Cliff Palace, is thought to be the largest cliff dwelling in North America, with over 150 rooms, 23 ceremonial kiva structures, and the ruins of a guard tower that was once almost 30 feet high.
Visitors to Mesa Verde National Park can see several of the largest and most well-preserved cliff dwellings, including the Cliff Palace, as part of their trip. While you can’t wander through the ruins on your own, the park does offer tours of a few different sites, including the Cliff Palace, Long House, and Balcony House.
There is an exception: one of the cliff dwellings, the Step House, is open to the public so you can walk through it without a guide. The Step House is relatively unique because it contains structures built by two different cultures: the Basketmaker people, who had a pithouse community there in the 7th century, and the Ancestral Pueblo, who built masonry houses on the pithouse ruins about 500 years later. The Ancestral Puebloans were descendants of the Basketmaker people, so the Step House is a great opportunity to see how a culture can change over the course of centuries.
To make the most of your trip, check out our Mesa Verde Self-Guided Driving Tour, or you can sign up for Action+ and gain access to over 100 tours for a single yearly price.
