8 Strangest Landmarks in New Mexico

For many people around the world, New Mexico comes prepackaged with its own strange reputation. It was the site of the Roswell Incident and a former testing range for nuclear weapons. Today, its vast and arid yet oddly beautiful desert landscapes attract visitors to its scenic national parks, ancient historic sites, ski hills, and even some of its bigger cities and towns like Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

However, for those who want to really explore this Southwestern state's weird side, discover some of the strangest landmarks in New Mexico, which you can visit today.

The UFO Museum and Research Center

Opened in 1992, the International UFO Museum and Research Center sits in downtown Roswell, the very town made famous by the 1947 incident that sparked decades of extraterrestrial obsession in America and around the globe. Housed in a former movie theater, the museum contains a mix of documented military reports, newspaper clippings, and witness testimonies tied to the alleged crash of an unidentified flying object. Exhibits also cover broader UFO history, including global sightings and government investigations such as Project Blue Book.

Life-sized alien models, crash site recreations, and a library of declassified documents give the space a distinctly unconventional tone that some might call "pseudoscience." While some displays lean toward the sensational, the museum does try to maintain a strong focus on archival research and public education.

Whether visited for curiosity or serious inquiry, it remains one of the country’s most unusual repositories for unexplained phenomena and a key stop on the New Mexico Extraterrestrial and Space Trail, which encompasses 52 different sites.

The Musical Highway

Along a short stretch of Route 66 near Tijeras, a specially engineered road plays “America the Beautiful” when driven over at exactly 45 miles per hour. Known as the Musical Highway, it was installed in 2014 as part of a partnership between the New Mexico Department of Transportation and a private engineering firm.

Grooves were cut into the asphalt at specific intervals so that tires vibrating over them produced musical notes. The melody only plays properly when vehicles maintain the posted speed limit, making the installation a form of both entertainment and clever traffic control. The musical segment lasts just a few seconds, and the sound is only audible from inside the vehicle.

Although it has faded over time and is no longer maintained, it remains one of the most unusual examples of road engineering in the world.

Meow Wolf Santa Fe's House of Eternal Return

Opened in 2016, Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe is a 20,000-square-foot immersive art installation housed inside a repurposed bowling alley in Santa Fe. The exhibit presents a fictional narrative centered on the mysterious disappearance of the Selig family, whose Victorian house doubles as a portal to dozens of surreal, interconnected environments for you to wander around.

Within, you are able to explore rooms that could lead to anything, from glowing caves, neon forests, interdimensional portals, and spaces that defy conventions in all sorts of wild and wacky ways. While often described as a theme park for art, the installation also incorporates storytelling techniques found in video games and escape rooms.

About 135 local and national artists contributed to the project, combining sculptures, digital media, sound design, and interactive elements to create a nonlinear, exploratory experience like no other.

The House of Eternal Return has since become one of New Mexico’s most visited attractions and a must-see for art fans or anybody looking for something truly strange in the state's capital city.

McGinn’s PistachioLand

Located off US Highway 54 near Alamogordo, McGinn’s PistachioLand is home to what it claims is the “World’s Largest Pistachio,” which in reality is a 30-foot-tall concrete nut erected in 2008 as a tribute to farm founder Tom McGinn. The oversized sculpture stands at the entrance to a working pistachio ranch that also grows grapes for wine and sells various flavored nuts, candies, and souvenirs.

While the giant pistachio draws most of the attention, you can also take guided motorized tours of the orchards and learn about the cultivation of pistachios in the arid Tularosa Basin. Furthermore, an on-site tasting room offers samples of the farm’s wines, many of which are even infused with pistachio flavor!

While an odd yet fun roadside attraction, McGinn’s PistachioLand also offers a surprisingly educational insight into New Mexico's agricultural sector and the challenges of growing food in the desert.

Ghost Ranch

Ghost Ranch spans 21,000 acres of rugged high desert, known for its towering cliffs, multicolored rock formations, and long history of human habitation. The landscape became widely recognized through the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived and worked in the area for decades. Before that, it was a hideout for cattle rustlers in the 19th century, earning its eerie name from legends of evil local spirits.

Although the ghost stories, loosely based on ancient native folklore, may have originally just been made up as a way to keep intruders out, spooky tales of giant 30-foot snakes and other oddities on the land persisted among later settlers.

Today, the property serves as an overnight retreat and an outdoor education center. It contains hiking trails, paleontology exhibits, and tours of locations depicted in O’Keeffe’s art. The ranch has also yielded significant fossil discoveries, including Coelophysis, one of the earliest known dinosaurs.

Tinkertown Museum

Built over four decades by folk artist Ross Ward, the Tinkertown Museum in Sandia Park is a hand-built maze of miniature dioramas, carved figures, antique tools, carnival relics, and other odds and ends. Located off the Turquoise Trail, Tinkertown is both a worthwhile roadside attraction and a fascinating study of outsider art.

The museum opened to the public in 1983 and continues to operate as a tribute to Ward’s philosophy that life should be approached with imagination and an open, creative spirit.

The structure itself is composed of over 50,000 glass bottles embedded in mortar, surrounding rooms filled with animated Western towns, circus scenes, and mechanical oddities powered by coin-operated motors. One of the most talked-about exhibits is a full-sized wooden sailboat that once circumnavigated the globe.

Blue Hole

The Blue Hole in the city of Santa Rosa is an eye-catching natural artesian spring known for its strikingly clear water and unusual depth, a truly strange site in a state known for its vast, arid deserts. The Blue Hole is part of a network of sinkholes and underground water systems beneath the desert, formed by the region’s karst topography.

Measuring over 80 feet across and plunging 80 feet deep, the pool maintains a constant temperature of 62°F year-round and refills itself with over 3,000 gallons of fresh water per minute.

Once functioning as a fish hatchery, the site is now a certified scuba diving location and draws divers from around the country due to its visibility and consistent conditions. It's also a popular swimming spot, with its cold water providing respite from the hot New Mexican sun.

White Sands National Park

White Sands National Park protects the largest gypsum dune field in the world, visually standing out on both Google Maps and in real life in an incredible way. Covering roughly 275 square miles within the Tularosa Basin of southern New Mexico, this renowned natural landmark is one of the most beloved in the Southwest.

Unlike typical sand dunes, which are composed of quartz, these dunes are made of gypsum crystals that eroded from nearby mountains, dissolved in water, and were deposited after evaporation. The result is a brilliant white landscape that reflects sunlight and remains cool to the touch, even in hot conditions.

First designated as a national monument in 1933 and reclassified as a national park in 2019, the site also supports unique plant and animal species adapted to the shifting terrain. Like many national parks, a number of hiking trails can be enjoyed and explored here, too. For a more exciting activity, sand sledding is allowed on some of its steeper dune faces!

Portions of the park occasionally close due to nearby missile testing conducted at White Sands Missile Range.

See These Curious Destinations in New Mexico Today

Whether you are looking for something new to do while strolling around the streets of Santa Fe or are in search of the state's geological wonders in the countryside, exploring New Mexico can be anything but dull. These unique landmarks are just a few to find, but they are sure to create long-lasting memories wherever you travel in the Land of Enchantment in the foreseeable future.