Mesa Verde

Mesa Verde National Park was established in 1906 in south-western Colorado, and was the first American national park created to protect a heritage built by human beings rather than a natural landscape. President Theodore Roosevelt declared it in order to preserve "the works of man", in the words of the act itself.

The mesa is a sandstone platform cut by deep canyons, and between the sixth and thirteenth centuries the Ancestral Puebloan peoples built an extraordinary complex of dwellings, kivas and storerooms in the natural alcoves hollowed out of its walls. Cliff Palace, with more than a hundred and fifty rooms, is the largest complex of its kind in North America. In the late thirteenth century the population left the area in a process linked to a prolonged drought and moved south, where their descendants form today's Pueblo communities.

The natural setting is piñon-juniper woodland and Colorado Plateau scrub, with puma, black bear, mule deer and canyon birdlife. Wildfires have been a recurrent threat and have affected much of the park's area in recent decades, in the process laying bare sites until then hidden by vegetation.